Life-Cycle Assessment of Wastewater Treatment Plant

The life cycle of wastewater treatment plant can have adverse effect on the environment in term depletion of fossil, climate change, resource depletion, ozone layer depletion and cause toxicological effect on human health and ecosystem. This can be resolved using life cycle assessment (LCA) method where the severity of the environmental burden of the wastewater treatment plant can be evaluated. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method to calibrate and evaluate the environmental impact associated with a service, product or process from cradle-to-grave perspective. The objective of this project is to design the inventory data for the whole process of wastewater treatment plant and evaluate the environmental impact by using the ReCiPe method to conduct the LCA. ReCiPe method is definitely chosen since it has additional advantage compared to other LCA methods. Besides, other LCA methods have a lot of weak points which resulted in less precision of the whole analysis. The scope of the study for this project is focused on the cradle-to-grave approached, which is the assessment is take place from the beginning construction of the wastewater plant until the disposal waste of the wastewater. For the methodology, the LCA of the whole wastewater treatment plant was done by using SimaPro software where it illustrated the environmental burden of the wastewater treatment plant in graphical form. Prior to that, the inventory data for wastewater treatment plant was designed based on the reliable literature review and input into database of the software. Designing of the inventories is the data demanding stage in LCA, as it is the most challenging step in which the data must be evaluated, reviewed and if necessary, corrected to maintain the quality of the result assessment. The study produced 3 categories of results which are midpoint indicators, endpoint damage indicators and single score perspectives. Advance particulars of the project will be described in the subsequent chapters.