Assessment of Municipal Effluent Reclamation Process Based on the Information of Cost Analysis and Environmental Impacts

Water shortage has now become a global issue. Reclamation of the effluent from municipal wastewater treatment plant is feasible for supplying the quick growth of water requirement. The objective of this study was to conduct both the cost analysis and environmental impact evaluation of two reclamation processes: sand filter – ultrafiltration - reverse osmosis (SF-UF-RO) and sand filter - electrodialysis reversal (SF-EDR). The results will serve as a reference for selecting the process in the scale-up construction works. Two processes were installed in a reclamation pilot plant in Futian Water Resource Recycling Center (Taichung City, Taiwan) and operated in parallel to evaluate their stability and product quality. The cost analysis was conducted to estimate the capital requirement of building large-scale plant for reclaiming the effluent. The cost of land construction, mechanical with electronic equipment and operation with maintenance were all considered in the analysis. On the other hand, the environmental assessment of these processes has been realized by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The software Sima Pro 7.3 was used as the LCA analysis tool. Four different evaluation methods, including Eco-indicator 99, Ecopoints 97, Impact 2002+ and CML 2 baseline 2000, were applied. The results show that the water quality of SF-EDR has similar potential in reclaiming the effluent from municipal water resource recycling center as SF-UF-RO. The cost of SF-EDR is lower than that of SF-UF-RO. In the environmental analysis, the LCA demonstrates that SF-EDR may create more impacts on the environment due to more consumption on electricity and chemicals than SF-UF-RO. Using SF-UF-RO as the effluent reclamation process may be an option causing less impacts on climate change.