Life cycle assessment of high concentration organic wastewater treatment by catalytic wet air oxidation

There have been many studies on life cycle assessment in sewage treatment, but there are scarce few studies on the treatment of industrial wastewater in combination with advanced oxidation technology,especially in catalytic wet air oxidation(CWAO). There are no cases of using actual industrialized data onto life cycle assessment. This paper uses Simapro 9.0 software to establish a life cycle assessment model for the treatment of high-concentration organic wastewater by CWAO, and comprehensively explains the impact on the environment from three aspects: the construction phase, the operation phase and the demolition phase. In addition, sensitivity analysis and uncertainty analysis were performed. The results showed that the key factors affecting the environment were marine ecotoxicity, mineral resource consumption and global warming, the operation stage had the greatest impact on the environment,which was related to high power consumption during operation and emissions from the treatment process. Sensitivity analysis showed that electricity consumption has the greatest impact on abiotic depletion and freshwater aquatic ecotoxicity, and it also proved that global warming is mainly caused by pollutant emissions during operation phase. Monte Carlo simulations found slightly higher uncertainty for abiotic depletion and toxicity-related impact categories.