Optimisation of Wastewater Treatment Strategies in Eco-Industrial Parks: Technology, Location and Transport

TL;DR

This paper presents an optimization framework for designing sustainable wastewater treatment strategies in eco-industrial parks, integrating technology, location, and transport considerations to enhance resource recovery and reduce environmental impacts.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive optimization model that considers technological, spatial, and financial factors for eco-industrial park wastewater treatment design.

Findings

Transport network design significantly affects resource recovery efficiency.

Incorporating resource recovery impacts improves overall system sustainability.

Scenario analysis reveals the importance of integrated spatial and technological planning.

Abstract

The expanding population and rapid urbanisation, in particular in the Global South, are leading to global challenges on resource supply stress and rising waste generation. A transformation to resource-circular systems and sustainable recovery of carbon-containing and nutrient-rich waste offers a way to tackle such challenges. Eco-industrial parks have the potential to capture symbioses across individual waste producers, leading to more effective waste-recovery schemes. With whole-system design, economically attractive approaches can be achieved, reducing the nvironmental impacts while increasing the recovery of high-value resources. In this paper, an optimisation framework is developed to enable such design, allowing for wide ranging treatment options to be considered capturing both technological and fnancial detail. As well as technology selection, the framework also accounts for spatial aspects, with the design of suitable transport networks playing a key role. A range of scenarios are investigated using the network, highlighting the multi-faceted nature of the problem. The need to incorporate the impact of resource recovery at the design stage is shown to be of particular importance.