Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering , Northeastern University , 400 Snell Engineering Center, 360 Huntington Ave , Boston , Massachusetts 02115 , United States.
Environ Sci Technol. 2018 Oct 2;52(19):11346-11358. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.8b00036. Epub 2018 Sep 13.
The potential health effects associated with contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) have motivated regulatory initiatives and deployment of energy- and chemical-intensive advanced treatment processes for their removal. This study evaluates life cycle environmental and health impacts associated with advanced CEC removal processes, encompassing both the benefits of improved effluent quality as well as emissions from upstream activities. A total of 64 treatment configurations were designed and modeled for treating typical U.S. medium-strength wastewater, covering three policy-relevant representative levels of carbon and nutrient removal, with and without additional tertiary CEC removal. The USEtox model was used to calculate characterization factors of several CECs with missing values. Stochastic uncertainty analysis considered variability in influent water quality and uncertainty in CEC toxicity and associated characterization factors. Results show that advanced tertiary treatment can simultaneously reduce nutrients and CECs in effluents to specified limits, but these direct water quality benefits were outweighed by even greater increases in indirect impacts for the toxicity-related metrics, even when considering order-of-magnitude uncertainties for CEC characterization factors. Future work should consider water quality aspects not currently captured in life cycle impact assessment, such as endocrine disruption, in order to evaluate the full policy implications of the CEC removal.
与新兴关注污染物（CECs）相关的潜在健康影响促使监管机构采取行动，并部署能源和化学密集型先进处理工艺来去除这些污染物。本研究评估了与先进 CEC 去除工艺相关的生命周期环境和健康影响，涵盖了改善出水质量的好处以及上游活动的排放。总共设计和模拟了 64 种处理配置，用于处理典型的美国中等强度废水，涵盖了三个与政策相关的具有代表性的碳和养分去除水平，包括和不包括额外的三级 CEC 去除。USEtox 模型用于计算具有缺失值的几种 CEC 的特征化因子。随机不确定性分析考虑了进水水质的变异性以及 CEC 毒性和相关特征化因子的不确定性。结果表明，先进的三级处理可以同时将废水中的营养物和 CEC 降低到规定的限值，但对于与毒性相关的指标，这些直接的水质效益被间接影响的更大增加所抵消，即使考虑到 CEC 特征化因子的数量级不确定性也是如此。未来的工作应该考虑目前在生命周期影响评估中未捕获的水质方面，例如内分泌干扰，以评估 CEC 去除的全部政策影响。
