Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Costing on Brine Effluent Treatment

Abstract

The water crisis is one of the most important global risks influencing humanity. Urbanization as well as economic, social and technological evolution have led to water overconsumption across the world and thus to water scarcity. Industry comprises one of the main water consumers along with agriculture and municipalities. At the same time, industry constitutes a significant water polluter since a large amount of its wastewater does not receive treatment prior to its disposal to the environment. One of the greatest sources of wastewater is brine effluent, a hypersaline concentrate created during the water treatment in the industries. In an effort to tackle the challenges that brine effluent imposes, both in terms of management and costs, the process industry should shift to technical solutions that foster sustainable development. There are three dimensions with respect to sustainability; the environmental, the economic and the social. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as well as Life Cycle Costing (LCC), both of which are the main axis of this thesis, are tools for identifying and analyzing environmental and economic impacts respectively. The object of this thesis is the Zero Brine (ZB) project which promotes a closed-loop approach to address the complex brine effluents by eliminating them, mitigating the effects of industrial processes while recovering materials such as water, energy, minerals, magnesium, and salts. This research is focusing on the Dutch case study where the assessment of a demineralized water production system before and after the implementation of ZB applications is taking place. The evaluation of sustainability performance comprises one of the main goals of this project. Thus, this thesis aims to assess the environmental and economic sustainability of the ZB project by implementing the LCA and LCC techniques. To that end, the parallel implementation of LCA and LCC was performed. Furthermore, the three types of LCC; conventional (cLCC), environmental (eLCC) and societal (sLCC), were also included in the analysis. The results of the analysis showed that the implementation of the ZB system has ambiguous results concerning environmental performance. On the one hand, the majority of the environmental impacts were decreased by 15% to 22%, On the other hand, global warming, acidification as well as particulate matter formation categories were sharply increased by more than 100%. From the economic assessment results, it was concluded that the application of ZB design is not financially viable since it degrades the economic performance of the current production scheme. By estimating the NPV after the implementation of ZB applications, it was observed that it is negative thus rendering the project unsustainable Overall, to enhance the environmental and economic performance of ZB applications, more research required to tackle the abovementioned issues and to render ZB project a sustainable, industrially applicable solution for the treatment of brine and the recovery of valuable resources.