Sustainable Wastewater Management:Modeling and Decision Strategies for Unused Medications and Wastewater Solids.

Wastewater Treatment Sustainability Decision Support Tools;Civil and Environmental Engineering;Engineering;Environmental Engineering

Cook, Sherri MichelleRaskin, Lutgarde M. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Wastewater Treatment Sustainability Decision Support Tools;    Civil and Environmental Engineering;    Engineering;    Environmental Engineering;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/109006/cooksm_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

;;Triple bottom line;; evaluation techniques that include treatment performance models are necessary to help decision-makers evaluate new practices for sustainable wastewater management.To this end, this dissertation developed a sustainability decision-making framework that integrates life-cycle thinking with treatment technology assessments and applied it to two key wastewater treatment sustainability issues: effluent quality and energy use. The first study focuses on the occurrence of pharmaceuticals in wastewater effluents. Increasingly, environmental professionals are recommending that consumers return their unused medications to a central location for incineration, thereby avoiding pharmaceuticals in the water.However, these ;;take-back” programs might result in significant air pollution without significantly improving pharmaceutical occurrence in the environment. This study quantified and compared the environmental emissions associated with the direct disposal of medication to a wastewater treatment plant, to a household trashcan for landfilling or incineration, and to a collection program for incineration. A decision-support tool was created by developing and combining disposal system models and pharmaceutical fate models using life cycle assessment methodology. This tool was used to evaluate and compare the environmental impacts of different disposal scenarios.The environmental impact results coupled with disposal cost and participation data indicate that trash disposal is the best option to reduce pharmaceutical emissions. The second study focuses on wastewater treatment plant energy use.Anaerobic codigestion is an emerging practice used to increase energy recovery from waste, but its energy production potential is limited by process stability issues. In order to determine how to maximize energy production without compromising process stability, a comprehensive and quantitative stability assessment was created and linked with an anaerobic digestion process model. The resulting decision support tool was used to evaluate multiple waste combination and energy production scenarios. The results revealed potential limitations of current design guidelines and identified influent characteristics that have the greatest potential for stable energy recovery from waste. This tool provides a mechanism for establishing influent criteria that can be coupled with environmental impact and cost data in order to design sustainable codigestion systems.