Life Cycle Assessment of the Neutralization Process in a Textile WWTP

Abstract

Although industrial wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) have become an important part of textile facilities in reducing environmental pollution problems, they also produce sludge and various emissions such as high chemical oxygen demand, color and conductivity which have serious negative impacts on the environment. One of the processes with enormous chemical consumption in industrial WWTP of textile facilities is the neutralization process, which aims to adjust the pH of the wastewater. Neutralization processes needed to be optimized in order to determine its overall environmental impacts and then identify the most environmentally appropriate options. The aim of this study is to compare the environmental impacts of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, which are two alternative chemicals used in the neutralization process of textile facilities, using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach. The environmental impacts resulting from the use of these two chemicals proposed according to the Reference document on Best Available Techniques (BREF) Document for Textile Industry were revealed by the CML-IA method and the gate-to-gate method. According to the results, using carbon dioxide instead of sulfuric acid, the best improvement was in the abiotic depletion category with 92%, while the least improvement was in the eutrophication potential with 39%. No improvement was observed in the global warming potential and human toxicity impacts.