An operational framework to quantify the sustainability of water resource recovery facilities

Typically, wastewater utilities use economic analyses to evaluate new investments. However, recently there has been the need to include other criteria such as environmental, technical and societal criteria. Such a decision support tool is not least relevant in the transition from conventional wastewater treatment plants to water resource recovery facilities, having focus on recovering energy, nutrients etc. Together with universities and wastewater utilities, we developed a sustainability framework to quantify environmental, societal and technical impacts along with economic analyses. We identified 22 criteria and associated quantitative and semi-quantitative indicators. We demonstrated the framework through real cases within wastewater treatment. Results indicated that this framework can both support simple decisions dealing with material choices and high-level decision making such as the implementation of novel technologies for carbon and energy recovery. The framework helped utilities prioritize options that reduce environmental impacts and increase technical and societal value rather than the cheapest solutions.