Cost-performance indicator for comparative environmental assessment of water treatment plants

To compare potable water production plants on the basis of the environmental impacts generated by the treatment, including water resource depletion, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is often used as referential. A comparison based only on the environmental impacts can however be misleading. Criteria for drinkability are usually defined as thresholds and the actual water quality gain achieved by different treatment chains shall be considered in the assessment for a fair comparison. Otherwise, chains treating low quality water resources could be disadvantaged as compared to alternatives using higher quality water resource, also when the depletion of the raw resource is included in the impact assessment. In this study, a novel Cost-Performance (CP) indicator has been developed and tested for the case of two existing water treatment plants located in the Paris Region. CP is the ratio between the total environmental impact generated by the treatment (i.e. the LCA score, eventually monetarised) and the total quality gain from raw to treated water. For the test case, three life cycle impact assessment methods, ReCiPe, Stepwise and Eco-costs (the latter two including monetarisation) have been considered. The water quality gain is based on 8 relevant parameters measured before and after treatment. The parameters are further aggregated using the French water quality valuation system SEQ-Eau. Paired t-test is then used to calculate the confidence interval for the average quality gain which then determines the confidence interval of the CP. Independent t-test on the CPs of the two alternative plants allows checking if their performances can be distinguished. Although in the specific test case the comparison is not conclusive, due to the similarity between the water quality gains, realistic breakthrough values have been obtained, especially using ReCiPe. The meaningfulness of the monetarisation of the LCA results has been highlighted as well.