GENERAL INFORMATION

Title

Carbon Footprint of Wastewater Treatment

Sending Institution

University of Balamand (UOB) in Lebanon

Host Institution

University of Lleida (UdL) - Igualada Campus in Spain

Advisor(s)

Prof. Rita Puig from UdL

Dr. Rima Manneh from UOB and Dr. Makram El Bachawati from UOB

Start Date

Mid-September 2023

Application Deadline

August 9, 2023

Keywords

Wastewater Treatment, Life Cycle Assessment, Sustainability, Environmental Impacts, Recycling, Carbon footprint

Profile & Skills Required

• The candidate must have a Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent in Chemical Engineering.
• The candidate must be fluent in English and/or French.
• The candidate must have a good capacity for using digital tools (modeling, statistical analysis, etc.)

Promoting Research Work

All relevant results will be published in international journals and presented at national and international conferences. In addition, if these materials perform well, the patentability of any new results will be considered before any public disclosure.

TRAINING DETAILS

Description

The increase in pollution in the wastewater streams generated from many sectors called for optimizing the adapted wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) techniques comprising of the primary, secondary, and tertiary treatments that aim for the optimal removal of these toxic compounds before releasing the effluent into the environment. However, it is usually forgotten that these processes have direct environmental effects and impacts. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool to analyze the potential environmental impacts of products or services during their entire life cycle, from production and distribution, until their use and end-of-life phases or services. In addition, it includes the upstream (e.g., suppliers) and downstream (e.g., waste management) processes associated with them. In particular, a carbon footprint study is an LCA that focuses on the climate change impact category. Life cycle assessment (LCA) studies have been widely used to quantify the environmental impacts associated with urban water infrastructure, specifically wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) (Byrne et al., 2017).

Since the wastewater fields target pollutant removal, include resource recovery, and pursue circular economies, these studies can play a chief role since they evaluate emerging technologies and processes' environmental sustainability and capture trade-offs across various categories of ecological concerns (Guest et al., 2009). Being a quantitative environmental assessment method, LCA serves as a useful decision-support tool for investigating alternative future operational scenarios during strategic planning within the water sector (Corominas et al., 2020).

This training will allow the candidate to learn and perform models on Simapro and/or Gabi software. Field visits to wastewater treatment plants will be conducted to visualize and obtain real-time data.

Objectives