Beyond Energy Balance: Environmental Trade-Offs of Organics Capture and Low Carbon-to-Nitrogen Ratio Sewage Treatment Systems.

Several life-cycle assessments (LCAs) have evaluated the environmental impacts (EIs) of different wastewater treatment (WWT) configurations, attempting resource recovery and energy efficiency. However, a plant-wide LCA considering up-concentration primary treatment and low carbon-to-nitrogen (C/N) ratio sewage at the secondary biological treatment (SBT) has not yet been conducted. This study identifies the environmental trade-offs and hotspots for the chemically enhanced primary treatment (CEPT) and low C/N ratio SBT emerging processes compared to conventional WWT.

A Standardized Stoichiometric Life-Cycle Inventory for Enhanced Specificity in Environmental Assessment of Sewage Treatment.

In recent years, many life-cycle assessments (LCAs) have been applied to the field of sewage treatment (ST). However, most LCAs lack systematic data collection (DC) and processing methods for inventories of conventional ST (CST), much less for recently developed technologies. In addition, the use of site-generic databases results in LCAs that lack the representativeness and understanding of the regional environmental impacts and trade-offs between different impact categories, especially nutrient enrichment and toxicity-related categories.