An integrated framework for sustainability assessment of seawater desalination

In this work, a universal integrated framework to assess the sustainability of desalination technologies was developed. The framework integrates the techno-economic, environmental and social factors of sustainability using a combination of multi-criteria decision analysis techniques, such as the analytic hierarchy process, swing and weighted summation methods. The framework was based on selected sub-factors assigned to each sustainability factor. While these sub-factors were measured quantitatively or qualitatively, they were all subjected to normalization. A group of global desalination experts were engaged in this study, through a survey used to determine the relative importance of the sustainability factors and the sub-factors. To demonstrate the framework, it was applied to the three dominant desalination technologies in the UAE; MSF, MED, and SWRO. The results showed that SWRO is the most sustainable technology followed by MED then MSF. Changing the sub-factors normalization techniques didn't show an impact on this overall conclusion. Then, a sensitivity analysis was conducted where the weights of both factors and sub-factors were altered, to study their impact on the overall sustainability ranking. Although this framework was demonstrated via the assessment of sustainability of desalination technologies in the UAE, it can be universally applied to other desalination technologies and/or other countries.