from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Management of non-renewable resources, including metals, is a key issue in the circular economy and one of the priorities of the EU's environmental policy. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a technique for assessing the environmental impact in a product or technology life cycle which allows the estimation of metal, minerals and fossil fuels consumption, including both direct demand for them in the technological processes as well as indirect demand for them in the production of raw materials, materials and energy used in these processes. The analysis results of cumulative metal consumption in wastewater treatment system based on life cycle analysis are presented in this paper. In addition to economic issues, the use of methods to assess environmental performance at the stage of construction, operation and decommissioning of water and wastewater infrastructure is becoming more important in the wastewater economy. In this context, a new approach to the assessment of environmental aspects is the use of a life cycle analysis concept that allows the assessment of cumulative resource demands throughout the whole life cycle of a wastewater treatment system. The Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) of wastewater treatment system proposed in this paper allows the identification and assessment of its potential environmental impacts from the perspective of metal consumption. It has been shown that the LCA technique is an appropriate tool for assessing the cumulative metal consumption.
Keywords: Metal depletion, natural resources management, wastewater treatment system, life cycle assessment© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.