LCA assessment of desalination on environmetal impact and brine resourcing
Desalination is being widely adopted worldwide as an effective water supply solution for coastal and offshore areas.China has a very long coastline,but coastal regions commonly face the challenge of balancing economic development and scarce freshwater resources.For the reason,developing desalination has been included in the China's development strategy on water resources.However,it is essential to quantitively understand the ecological impacts of different desalination processes on correct choices in the future.For this reason,a life cycle assessment(LCA)method was used to assess two membrane desalination processes:reverse osmosis and electrodialysis,and three thermal desalination processes:multi-stage flash distillation,multi-effect distillation and membrane distillation.The globally representative approach-ReCiPe 2016 was applied to analyze and compare the environmental impacts of these different desalination processes.The results reveal that the membrane processes are relatively lower in environmental impacts,primarily due to fossil energy consumption and that thermal processes are higher in environmental impacts because of big-sized heat production equipment.Further assessments on the membrane processes with photovoltaic and wind-driven powers indicate that wind energy could reduce the environmental impact factors on the membrane processes by 47%to 55%,particularly reducing the global warming potential(GWP)by up to 90%.Additionally,brine resourcing could effectively mitigate not only the marine ecological impact due to brine directly discharged into sea,but also could recover minerals from brine.The assessment on brine resourcing was finally conducted and significant environmental benefits could be achieved from recovering minerals.
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