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Comparative Life Cycle Assessment and Cost Analysis of Bath Wastewater Treatment Plant Upgrades - slides
Citation:
Morelli, B., S. Cashman, Cissy Ma, J. Garland, J. Turgeon, L. Millmore, D. Bless, AND M. Nye. Comparative Life Cycle Assessment and Cost Analysis of Bath Wastewater Treatment Plant Upgrades - slides. Northeast Residuals & Biosolids Conference 2017, Burlington, VT, October 25 - 27, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
Energy recovery from wastewater treatment and outside high strength organic waste can be optimized and achieve the better environmental performances.
Description:
Many municipalities are facing the call to increase nutrient removal performance of their wastewater treatment plants in order to limit the impacts of eutrophication on the receiving waterbodies. The associated upgrades often demand investment in new technologies and increases in energy and chemical use, which create the potential for environmental trade-offs. The main goal of this study is to quantify these trade-offs for Bath NY wastewater treatment plant (wwtp) from an environmental and cost perspective using the life cycle assessment (LCA) and cost analysis approach. The impacts of a conventional activated sludge treatment process are compared against an upgraded system incorporating chemically enhanced primary settling, Modified Ludzack-Ettinger secondary treatment, and anaerobic digestion (AD). The sensitivity analysis explores the effect of composting emission assumptions, AD operational performance, and the use of excess AD capacity for the processing of high strength organic waste on environmental impact and cost per cubic meter of wastewater treated. The results generally show that improvements in environmental performance are available to communities that undertake a similar approach to treatment plant upgrades. Improved environmental performance is