An overview of LCA applied to various membrane technologies: Progress, challenges, and harmonization

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been developed to assess the possible environmental impact of a system over its life cycle. As LCA provides information on how to create a more sustainable infrastructure while also recognizing environmental hotspots, there is a growing interest in the sustainability of membrane treatment systems, especially for wastewater treatment (WWT). As a result, it is critical to revisit previous research to identify the challenges and accomplishments in implementing LCA for membrane systems. This paper provides a thorough review of 57 previous studies on the LCA of membrane systems for WWT. The collection of previous LCA studies was based on articles published between 2000 and 2020, where the progress, trends, challenges, and potential harmonization were explored using content analysis. Membrane bioreactor (MBR) and reverse osmosis (RO) membranes are the frequently studied systems concern-ing environmental impact. The review of articles was bound by the main frameworks of ISO norms and revealed differences in defining the functional unit, system boundaries, impact evaluation categories, and method of testing LCA, making comparisons difficult. The inconsistencies in defining the impact evaluation and methods used for certain papers, in addition to the lack of LCA studies in some geographical areas, are some of the difficulties addressed and illustrated in this paper. To ensure reliability and reproducibility, a more standardized implementation of LCA should be considered, allowing its adoption on new and existing membrane systems. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is developed to evaluate the possible environmental impact of a system over its life cycle. There is growing interest in the sustainability of membrane treatment systems, especially for wastewater treatment. This paper reviews 57 previous studies on the LCA of membrane systems for WWT, identifying challenges in implementing LCA.