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Environmental tradeoffs in municipal wastewater treatment plant upgrade: a life cycle perspective

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Abstract

Municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) play an indispensable role in improving environmental water quality in urban areas. Existing WWTPs, however, are an important source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and may not be able to treat increasingly complicated wastewater or meet stringent environmental standards. These WWTPs can be updated to address these challenges, and different technologies are available but with potentially different environmental implications. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a widely used approach to identify alternatives with lower environmental footprint. In this study, LCA was applied to an actual urban WWTP, considering four scenarios involving upgrading and energy-resource recovery. The environmental performance with respect to life cycle GHG emissions and eutrophication impact was analyzed. The environmental benefits of reduced water pollution and energy and material displacement associated with energy-resource recovery process were also considered. The results showed tradeoffs among the four scenarios. Although upgrading the studied WWTP would meet discharge standard for total phosphorus and reduce total eutrophication impact by about 19%, it would increase GHG emissions by at least 16%. Besides, the energy-resource recovery mode for existing WWTP (S2) performs the best in terms of GHG emissions. For different biogas utilization methods, combined heat and power (CHP) system is superior to the existing method of delivering biogas to gas grid, in terms of energy recovery or reduction of GHG emissions and eutrophication impact. Our research results may provide a reference for plant managers to select the most environmentally friendly upgrade scheme and energy-resource recovery technique for future upgrade projects.

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Abbreviations

PT:

Primary treatment

ST:

Secondary treatment

TT:

Tertiary treatment

SD:

Sludge disposal

PAD:

Pretreatment and anaerobic digestion

DLBS:

Digestion liquid and biogas slurry treatment

BT:

Biogas treatment

COD:

Chemical oxygen demand

BOD:

Biochemical oxygen demand

SS:

Suspended solids

TN:

Total nitrogen

NH3-N:

Ammonia nitrogen

TP:

Total phosphorus

BIOCOS:

Biological combined system

CHP:

Combined heat and power

CWSBR:

Constant water level sequencing batch reactor

GHG:

Greenhouse gas

LCA:

Life cycle assessment

NEB:

Net environmental benefit

PAM:

Polyacrylamide

STP:

Sludge treatment plant

WWTP:

Wastewater treatment plant

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Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Funding

This study was supported by the China Scholarship Council and Liaoning Major Scientific Technological Special Project (2019JH1/10300001).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Ocean Energy Utilization and Energy Conservation of Ministry of Education, School of Energy and Power Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Linggong Road 2, Dalian, 116024, Liaoning, China

    Shuai Shao & Hailin Mu

  2. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA

    Shuai Shao & Arturo A. Keller

  3. School of Environmental Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Linggong Road 2, Dalian, 116024, Liaoning, China

    Shuai Shao, Haochen Hou, Fenglin Yang & Yun Zhang

  4. Key Laboratory of the Three Gorges Reservoir Region’s Eco-Environment, Ministry of Education, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400045, China

    Yi Yang

  5. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Ulsan, Ulsan, 680-749, Republic of Korea

    Yi Yang

Authors
  1. Shuai Shao
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by SS and HH. SS, HM, FY, and YZ prepared the first draft. AAK and YY participated in critical revision of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Shuai Shao or Yi Yang.

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Shao, S., Mu, H., Keller, A.A. et al. Environmental tradeoffs in municipal wastewater treatment plant upgrade: a life cycle perspective. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 34913–34923 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-13004-7

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