A new quantitative overall environmental performance indicator for a wastewater treatment plant

Abstract

A Wastewater Treatment Plant consists of multiple equipment and processes to treat wastewater. The wastewater treatment process consumes resources and releases emissions that could potentially harm the environment. Due to the growing concern on the environmental impact of Wastewater Treatment Plants, much research has been done to assess its performance and optimize its processes towards cleaner productions. Yet to date, the study on quantifying the overall environmental performance of a Wastewater Treatment Plant has not been done. The objective of this paper is to develop a new green index as a unified overall quantitative environmental performance indicator for a Wastewater Treatment Plant and its associated processes. The developed green index is applied as an indicator to represent the multiple green elements of the treatment processes, and to benchmark the performance of the Wastewater Treatment Plant under study. The Green Index enables a facility manager to efficiently monitor, analyse and improve the performance of a Wastewater Treatment Plant in a cleaner production program.