Performance of high-efficiency UV-C LEDs in water disinfection: Experimental, life cycle assessment, and economic analysis of different operational scenarios.

The widespread use of low or medium pressure mercury lamps in UV-C water disinfection should consider recent advances in UV-C LED lamps that offer a more sustainable approach and avoid its main drawbacks. The type of water and the mode of operation are critical when deciding on the treatment technology to be used. Therefore, this study investigates the potential application of UV-C LED disinfection technology in terms of kinetics, environmental assessment, and economic analysis for two scenarios: the continuous disinfection of a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), and disinfection of harvested rainwater (RWH) in a residential household that operates intermittently.

The Relevance of Life Cycle Assessment Tools in the Development of Emerging Decarbonization Technologies.

The development of emerging decarbonization technologies requires advanced tools for decision-making that incorporate the environmental perspective from the early design. Today, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the preferred tool to promote sustainability in the technology development, identifying environmental challenges and opportunities and defining the final implementation pathways. So far, most environmental studies related to decarbonization emerging solutions are still limited to midpoint metrics, mainly the carbon footprint, with global sustainability implications being relatively unexplored.

Bringing value to the chemical industry from capture, storage and use of CO: A dynamic LCA of formic acid production.

Low carbon options for the chemical industry include switching from fossil to renewable energy, adopting new low-carbon production processes, along with retrofitting current plants with carbon capture for ulterior use (CCU technologies) or storage (CCS). In this paper, we combine a dynamic Life Cycle Assessment (d-LCA) with economic analysis to explore a potential transition to low-carbon manufacture of formic acid. We propose new methods to enable early technical, environmental and economic assessment of formic acid manufacture by electrochemical reduction of CO (CCU), and compare this production route to the conventional synthesis pathways and to storing CO in geological storage (CCS).