Wastewater Treatment and Environmental Footprint Assessment

Dear Colleagues,

The collection and treatment of wastewater was a fundamental achievement of the last century. The current challenge (plants of the future) is characterized by two main goals: 1) increasing the purification efficiency (with a focus on trace pollutants, microplastics, antibiotic resistant genes) and 2) shifting the paradigm towards the concept of biorefinery (thus recovering material resources and energy from wastewater). In light of this challenge, the environmental impact of these actions and measures must be accounted for, (environmental) sustainability being the main driver of the whole process. Several methodologies and approaches have been proposed for assessing the environmental footprint of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). LCA (life cycle assessment) based studies have been conducted, for example, in order to compare the environmental performance of different treatment options, conventional and non-conventional technologies, process control strategies and water and sewage management options. However, a range of methodological approaches to developing a life cycle impact assessment have been explored, yielding quite different conclusions. In life-cycle-based methodologies, the assessment of the effects on the different impact categories is based on mass flows of pollutant discharged in the environment. Nevertheless, several studies underline the criticalities of the chemical “single substances” approach. These limitations can be overcome by carrying out multi-tiered biological assays which can directly and more accurately measure the impact of a stream. Differently from the LCA approach, standardized procedures have not been defined yet for most biological assays. Finally, comparison of the impact on different compartments (i.e., atmosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere) is still a challenge. Therefore, this Special Issue is intended to bring together recent research or reviews on the above topics, so as to build a reference toward the definition of a standardized approach for assessing the environmental footprint of wastewater treatment facilities, this being recognized as a fundamental aspect of the decision-making process for the development of suitable solutions for environmental protection.

Prof. Dr. Giorgio Bertanza
Prof. Dr. Roberta Pedrazzani
Guest Editors

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• LCA 
• OEF, PEF 
• Carbon footprint 
• Water footprint 
• Wastewater treatment technologies 
• Energy consumption/production 
• Sewage sludge 
• Resource recovery 
• Emerging pollutants 
• Water–energy nexus 
• Bioassays 
• Endpoint 
• Mass balance 
• Ecotoxicology 
• Process modeling