Providing clean water and treating wastewater require energy, chemicals and infrastructure. Treatment reduces pollutants in water, but also creates environmental impacts through its inputs, emissions and residual sludge.
At 2-0 LCA, we help water utilities, municipalities, industrial wastewater producers and technology providers assess these impacts. We use life cycle assessment to compare alternatives and support decisions about water supply, wastewater treatment and discharge.
Are you evaluating a treatment technology, changing an existing process or assessing a wastewater discharge?
We define the comparison around your decision. An assessment can examine water treatment, energy and chemical use, emissions to air and water, sludge management, and the recovery of materials or energy.
For water supply, we can compare treatment technologies and assess their environmental performance. For wastewater, we can evaluate treatment scenarios or model the fate of specific substances during treatment and discharge.
The comparison accounts for the service provided, including the quantity and quality of the water treated.
A treatment process that removes more pollutants may require additional electricity or chemicals. Recovering energy or nutrients can also change the overall environmental balance.
We assess these effects together to identify which impacts decrease and which may increase. Depending on the study, relevant impacts can include climate change, eutrophication, toxicity and water resource use.
We examine how assumptions affect the results and identify where additional measurements would be useful.
Our Wastewater Club provides access to WW LCI, an Excel-based model for calculating life cycle inventories of urban wastewater discharges in more than 100 countries.
The model supports assessments of wastewater systems and products that generate wastewater, such as cleaning products, personal-care products and industrial chemicals. Users define the wastewater composition, and the model calculates inventories linked to the ecoinvent database.
