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LCA of Drinking Water Supply

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Abstract

Water supplies around the globe are growing complex and include more intense treatment methods than just decades ago. Now, desalination of seawater and wastewater reuse for both non-potable and potable water supply have become common practice in many places. LCA has been used to assess the potentials and reveal hotspots among the possible technologies and scenarios for water supplies of the future. LCA studies have been used to support decisions in the planning of urban water systems and some important findings include documentation of reduced environmental impact from desalination of brackish water over sea water, the significant impacts from changed drinking water quality and reduced environmental burden from wastewater reuse instead of desalination. Some of the main challenges in conducting LCAs of water supply systems are their complexity and diversity, requiring very large data collection efforts, with multiple sources of information, many of them not public and requiring cooperation. Important for product and system LCAs with substantial water use, it is emphasized that standard life cycle inventory databases do not reflect the significant variance in environmental impacts of water supply across locations and technologies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. HOFOR (Greater Copenhagen Utility), Ørestads Boulevard 35, 2300 Kbh S, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Berit Godskesen

  2. The Porter School of Environmental Studies, Tel-Aviv University, 69978, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Noa Meron

  3. Department of Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Bygningstorvet Building 115, 2800, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Martin Rygaard

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  1. Berit Godskesen
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  2. Noa Meron
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  3. Martin Rygaard
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Correspondence to Berit Godskesen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Michael Z. Hauschild

  2. IRSTEA, UMR ITAP, ELSA Research group and ELSA-PACT, Environmental and Social Sustainability Assessment, Montpellier, France

    Ralph K. Rosenbaum

  3. Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Stig Irving Olsen

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Godskesen, B., Meron, N., Rygaard, M. (2018). LCA of Drinking Water Supply. In: Hauschild, M., Rosenbaum, R., Olsen, S. (eds) Life Cycle Assessment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56475-3_33

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