Life cycle assessment of production of carriers used in MBBR

Abstract

MBBR has emerged as an advanced method to treat wastewater especially where compact space is a necessity. With increasing need of MBBR, the carriers used in MBBR are also getting popular. The carriers are produced by a very conventional extrusion method. This report discusses the environmental impacts made by the production of carriers which consider raw materials, manufacturing, storage, and transportation of carriers. The report aims to find the hotspots in the LCA of production of carriers.

OpenLCA has been utilized to conduct the LCA with ReCipe method for assessment and ecoinvent database has been used for several energy and raw materials inputs for LCA. The LCA was conducted for two locations Shanghai and Netherlands and a comparative study is presented in this report indicating that Shanghai has significantly more environmental impact primarily because the electricity used in Shanghai is not green. The major hotspots found in LCA are raw materials with most prominent factor as ethylene production, manufacturing phase and transportation. The study also discusses the benefits of relocating the manufacturing to Norway such as utilization of green energy for production from hydropower.