Page 281 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

262 Life Cycle Assessment of Wastewater Treatment

opportunities for promising techniques that meet the reality of most developing coun-
tries. High-performance tertiary treatment in LCA results should be considered with
caution, as normally, wastewater treatment in developing countries is mainly focused
on primary and secondary steps. So, to model a WWTP without a tertiary stage or
with a simplified system could better reflect emissions from actual systems, increasing
fidelity to reality. In addition, as in several developing countries the rural population is
very representative and sometimes predominant, LCA studies involving wastewater
systems focused on rural areas are encouraged. Lutterbeck et al. (2017), for example,
assessed constructed wetlands applied to treat wastewater in rural areas in Brazil.

12.5.2 consiDeraTion of regional cHaracTerisTics
One of the most critical concerns in LCA studies is establishing consistent inventory
data (Yoshida et al., 2014). From the existing studies involving LCA applications
to wastewater in developing countries, a common issue was observed: the lack of
regional models and databases. With the exception of developing countries connected
with Europe, which could adopt LCA from the European database, for most develop-
ing countries, characterization factors and life cycle inventories (LCIs) are scarce or
nonexistent. As already discussed, previous papers assessed wastewater manage-
ment scenarios in developing countries using LCA methodologies, inventories, and
characterization factors developed mainly for North American and European coun-
tries, which could increase uncertainty and limits the consistency of interpretation
of results. So, the development of LCI adapted to developing countries, as well as the
determination of regional characterization factors, could strongly improve the reli-
ability of LCA results and the conclusions obtained in future research. For Teodosiu
et al. (2016), who performed research on LCA in a wastewater system in Romania,
regionalized impacts could improve LCA effectiveness in supporting wastewater
decision-making, as a better representation of local conditions enables better estima-
tions of impacts generated by the alternatives evaluated.
Regionalization of LCI is required mainly due to differences in technologies from
one country to another, which includes the determination of LCI for regionally spe-
cific technologies as well as the revision of LCI for traditional technologies to consider
country adaptations that could impact resource consumption and/or emissions. Energy
mix is also an important regional and even local characteristic that needs to be incor-
porated into all LCA studies. As previously remarked for BRICs, developing countries
present a wide range of electricity mix arrangements that could greatly impact the final
results and conclusions, as presented in Hernandez-Padilla et al. (2017).
For Corominas et al. (2013), the development of LCA methodologies that consider
specific local factors is especially critical for the determination of eutrophication
impact, one of the main impact categories in the wastewater management context.
Hernandez-Padilla et al. (2017), assessing Latin American countries, showed how
the eutrophication impacts of an adopted wastewater solution can vary from one
country to another if country-specific factors are considered.
By the way, Hernandez-Padilla et al. (2017) is one of the few works that tried to
consider regional conditions by using a country-specific energy mix and specific
characterization factors for eutrophication in Latin American countries. The same