Water and Carbon Footprints for the Control of Wastewater Treatment Plants

Water and energy nexus concept is a fundamental new paradigm to apply to improve sustainable development policy also in connection with concerns about global warming. Water and energy are closely interconnected with each other especially in wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) where the scope of the plant is in fact the treatment of wastewater and to due this huge energy consumption is required. In a world where the effects of climate change are increasingly evident, it is therefore essential to control the environmental pressures of the WWTP with a view to making it sustainable. Different analytical tools are nowadays used to assess the environmental performance of the industrial plants. Among them, carbon and water footprint represent the two widely applied methods, through life cycle analysis (LCA). The research presents and discusses the assessment of environmental performance for a real big WWTP by applying the water and carbon footprint, with the aim of identifying and avoiding critical elements and increasing their environmental sustainability. The experimental results highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the investigated methods, pointing out the usefulness of applying them in an integrated manner in order to have the global view on the various components examined. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.