Departamento de Ingeniería Hidráulica y Ambiental, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Avda. Vicuña Mackenna, Santiago, Chile.
Departamento de Ingeniería Hidráulica y Ambiental, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Avda. Vicuña Mackenna, Santiago, Chile; Instituto de Procesos Sostenibles, Universidad de Valladolid, C/ Mergelina 4, Valladolid, Spain.
Water Res. 2023 Sep 1;243:120354. doi: 10.1016/j.watres.2023.120354. Epub 2023 Jul 14.
The transition to a neutral carbon and sustainable urban water cycle requires improving eco-efficiency in wastewater treatment processes. To support decision-making based on eco-efficiency evaluations, reliable estimations are fundamental. In this study, the eco-efficiency of a sample of 109 WWTPs was evaluated using efficiency analysis tree method. It combines machine learning and linear programming techniques and therefore, overcomes overfitting limitations of non-parametric methods used by past research on this topic. Results from the case study revealed that optimal costs and greenhouse gas emissions depend on the quantity of organic matter and suspended solids removed from wastewater. The estimated average eco-efficiency is 0.373 which involves that the assessed WWTPs could save 0.32 €/m and 0.11 kg of CO equivalent/m. Moreover, only 4 out of 109 WWTPs are identified as eco-efficient which implies that the majority of the evaluated facilities can achieve substantial savings in operational costs and greenhouse gas emissions.
向碳中和和可持续城市水循环的转变需要提高废水处理过程的生态效率。为了支持基于生态效率评估的决策，可靠的估计是基础。在这项研究中，使用效率分析树方法对 109 个 WWTP 的样本进行了生态效率评估。它结合了机器学习和线性规划技术，因此克服了过去关于这一主题的研究中非参数方法的过拟合限制。案例研究的结果表明，最佳成本和温室气体排放取决于从废水中去除的有机物和悬浮固体的数量。估计的平均生态效率为 0.373，这意味着评估的 WWTP 可以节省 0.32 欧元/立方米和 0.11 公斤二氧化碳当量/立方米。此外，在 109 个 WWTP 中只有 4 个被确定为生态高效，这意味着大多数被评估的设施可以在运营成本和温室气体排放方面实现显著节省。
