Environmental, Technical, and Economic Evaluation of a New Treatment for Wastewater from Slaughterhouses

The wastewater treatment has a fundamental role for all the industrial processes, being a crucial part in the water cycle. The meat industry around the world has severe problems associated with the huge freshwater requirements that increase with the population growth. However, nowadays, the most used slaughterhouse wastewater treatment (SWWT) system has negative environment impacts. Hence, the inclusion of the life cycle assessment method, as decision technique in the design and configuration of the treatment train for these industries, results in an attractive innovation. Particularly for the SWWT, the aerobic process is the most used approach; however, its high-energy requirements increase significantly the associated total cost. On the other hand, the upflow anaerobic sludge blanket process has been reported as an attractive treatment, but this needs a secondary treatment for achieving the environmental regulations for some pollutants. Therefore, this paper presents a techno-economic–environmental–social evaluation as a sustainable alternative in wastewater treatment train configuration based on the obtained results of the Trail and Refrigerator of the city of Morelia in Mexico. The results show that with the new configuration, the energetic requirement is reduced by 76%; thus, the operational cost is minimized in the same way, while the environmental impact is reduced by 30% with the integration of anaerobic and aerobic processes.