State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control & Resource Reuse School of Environment, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, PR China.
State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control & Resource Reuse School of Environment, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, PR China; The Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, Nanjing, 210093, PR China.
J Environ Manage. 2022 Apr 15;308:114642. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.114642. Epub 2022 Feb 4.
China has implemented increasingly stringent effluent standards for wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) to protect the aquatic environment, but at the cost of more resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. To elaborate tradeoffs between the elevated standard and the additional burden, we compile a 10-year inventory of 6032 WWTPs across China to estimate the impacts of changes in effluent pollutant concentration on operating costs and electricity consumption. Coupled with the increasing demand for wastewater treatment, upgrading standards to the Special Discharge Limit (SDL) by 2030 would increase electricity consumption and operating costs of the wastewater treatment sector by 86.59% and 70.44% compared to the status quo in 2015. The electricity consumption-induced GHG emissions would also increase by 72.21%, which accounts for 29.16% of total emissions in the domestic wastewater treatment sector. Substantial regional differences exist in terms of upgrade-induced resource burden. Less developed regions generally suffer more stress when encountering similar standards elevation. With large-scale microdata, our findings deepen the understanding of the potential cost of raising standards and provide insights into region-customized pollutant effluent standards implementation.
中国为保护水生态环境，不断提高污水处理厂（WWTP）的污水排放标准，但这也导致资源消耗和温室气体排放的增加。为了详细说明提高标准和增加负担之间的权衡取舍，我们编制了中国 6032 家 WWTP 的 10 年清单，以估算污水中污染物浓度变化对运行成本和电力消耗的影响。加上对污水处理需求的不断增加，到 2030 年将标准提高到特别排放标准（SDL），与 2015 年的现状相比，将使污水处理行业的电力消耗和运营成本分别增加 86.59%和 70.44%。电力消耗引起的温室气体排放量也将增加 72.21%，占国内污水处理行业总排放量的 29.16%。在升级引起的资源负担方面，存在显著的区域差异。在遇到类似标准提高的情况下，欠发达地区通常承受更大的压力。通过大规模微观数据，我们的研究结果加深了对提高标准的潜在成本的理解，并为实施针对特定区域的污染物排放标准提供了思路。
