Environmental Impact Assessment of Emerging MLD Desalination Plants, By Seyed Abdollatif Hashemifard

Research

Title	Environmental Impact Assessment of Emerging MLD Desalination Plants
Type	Presentation
Keywords	Life cycle assement (LCA), desalination, minimum liquid discharge (MLD), Reverse Osmosis (RO), Nanofiltration (NF), Membrane distillation (MD)
Researchers	Benyamin Bordbar (First researcher) , Arash Khosravi (Second researcher) , Seyed Abdollatif Hashemifard (Third researcher) , Mohammad Peydayesh (Fourth researcher) , Amani Al-Othman (Fifth researcher)

Abstract

With regard to sustainable development goals (SDG) 6, access to reliable water is an important and vital challenge in the world. In this study, 4 desalination plants based on reverse osmosis (RO), nanofiltration (NF), and membrane distillation (MD) were investigated with a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach to be implemented in Persian Gulf region. The individual RO, hybrid RO-RO, hybrid NF-RO, and hybrid RO-MD systems were evaluated from the perspective of freshwater recovery rate, climate change potential (global warming), eutrophication potential, ecotoxicity potential, and fossil depletion potential. It has been found the RO-MD and RO-RO were able to achieve the aim of minimal or minimum liquid discharge (MLD) strategy. Although the NF-RO is able to be used in MLD and ZLD technologies for seawater desalination, it is not appropriate approach for brackish water desalination to achieve the MLD strategy.