Climate change impacts of conventional sewage sludge treatment and disposal

Huimin Chang, Yan Zhao*, Valentina Bisinella, Anders Damgaard, Thomas H. Christensen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Sewage sludge (SS) management remains a challenge across the world. We quantified the potential climate change impacts of eight conventional technology configurations (TCs) for SS treatment and disposal by considering four different energy exchanges and using a life cycle assessment (LCA) model that employed uncertainty distributions for 104 model parameters. All TCs showed large climate change loads and savings (net values ranging from 123 – 1148 kg CO2-eq/t TS) when the energy exchange was with a fossil-based energy system, whereas loads and savings were approximately three times lower when the energy exchange was with a renewable energy system. Uncertainty associated with the climate change results was more than 100% with fossil-energy exchange and low TS content of SS but was lower for renewable energy. Landfilling had the greatest climate change impact, while thermal drying with incineration had the highest probability of providing better climate change performance than other TCs. The global sensitivity analysis identified nine critical technological parameters. Many of them can be easily measured for relevant SS and technology levels to improve specific estimates of climate change impact. When all scenarios were optimised to the 20% best cases, thermal drying with incineration outperformed the other TCs. This paper contributes to better quantifying the climate change impacts of different technologies used for sludge treatment given changing energy systems and identifies crucial parameters for further technological development.
Original languageEnglish
Article number120109
JournalWater Research
Volume240
Number of pages11
ISSN0043-1354
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Keywords

  • Sewage sludge
  • Climate change
  • Life cycle assessment
  • Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis
  • Treatment and disposal technology

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