Modeling the Impact of Salinity Variations on Aquatic Environments: Including Negative and Positive Effects in Life Cycle Assessment.

Salinity is changing in aquatic systems due to anthropogenic activities (like irrigation or dam management) and climate change. Although there are studies on the effects of salinity variations on individual species, little is known about the effects on overall ecosystems, these impacts being more uncertain in transitional waters such as estuaries or fiords. The few works that do address this topic have considered these impacts using ecotoxicity models.

Strategies for the valorisation of a protein-rich saline waste stream into polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA).

Saline Mussels Cooking Wastewater was valorised to produce PHA with Mixed Microbial Cultures (MMC). Due to the high protein content (1.8-5.

Environmental assessment of complex wastewater valorisation by polyhydroxyalkanoates production.

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) are biodegradable polymers with renewable origin that are expected to substitute conventional petrochemical plastics. However, before they are commercialized, life-cycle environmental validation is needed, to prove that there is an actual benefit with the replacement of non-renewable plastics with PHA. Nowadays, environmental evaluations assessing bioplastics production at full-scale are scarce due to the lack of data, so experimental results were used to evaluate the feasibility of PHA production employing high load wastewater.