Ranking wastewater treatment trains based on their impacts and benefits on human health: a Biological Assay and Disease approach

Several decision support systems have been developed in recent years, aimed at judging environmental technologies under the lens of a multi-criteria analysis. This has also been applied in the field of wastewater treatment, where different factors (techno-economic-environmental) are inherent to the process and have to be balanced. The aim of this work is to calculate the damage on human health as a key factor for the evaluation of different wastewater treatment processes. The damage due to emissions into both water and air was taken into account. Indeed, the benefits related to the improved effluent quality after treatment could be counteracted by the negative effects when computing atmospheric emissions related to energy requirement. While a set of specific cost factors was applied for air pollution, a highly innovative perspective was adopted in the case of water pollution: several biological assays were used to weight waterborne diseases. Their application in the framework of a decision making process represents a novel approach in the wastewater domain. In short, we found that the economic equivalent of the impact on human health is remarkably affected by the selected treatment train, ranging from approximate to 2 (sic)/PE/y for advanced systems up to approximate to 3 (sic)/PE/y for conventional activated sludge plants. In particular, the most advisable schemes consist of an activated sludge plant integrated with either i) activated carbon and sand filtration or ii) sand filtration and ozonation. Finally, the applicability of the proposed procedure is also discussed and compared with the conventional life cycle assessment (LCA) approach, and the main difference is pointed out: for the former, biological assays and related diseases are used for endpoint calculation while the latter is based on the effect of each single compound. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.