NDLI: Life cycle assessment of the City of Atlanta, Georgia’s centralized water system

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Jeong, Hyunju Minne, Elizabeth Crittenden, John C.
Copyright Year	2015
Abstract	The main goal of this study was to conduct a life cycle assessment (LCA) for the City of Atlanta’s (CoA) centralized water system in order to understand the sources of the largest environmental impacts in the system. The boundaries of the water system we studied included the water supply system, the wastewater collection and treatment system, and the stormwater collection system. The CoA has separate wastewater and stormwater collection systems; therefore, they are considered separately.We defined the functional unit (FU) of our study to be 1 m$^{3}$ of water distributed to the point-of-use, and our scope includes infrastructure construction and decommissioning in addition to system operation. We used the US Life Cycle Inventory (USLCI) and ecoinvent databases to inventory all emissions and resource use. We determined the major impacts of the water system and the sources that create these impacts using TRACI v2.1, which is the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methodology developed for North America by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In addition, a method to evaluate the impact of freshwater consumption on ecosystem was used in this study because it is excluded in TRACI v2.1.The four major impacts of the CoA’s centralized water system were carcinogenic effects, ecotoxicity, non-carcinogenic effects, and eutrophication; respectively, they contribute 62, 8, 6, and 5 % of the average impacts of a US resident per year (2008) for the annual water use of a single-family home resident. Notably, the input which causes 68 % of the carcinogenic effects, which has the largest normalized impact, was from infrastructure construction which is often ignored in the literature. Freshwater consumption had a relatively low impact, with an evaporative water loss of 0.23 m$^{3}$ per FU and a moderate level of water stress on the middle Chattahoochee River Basin; however, the impact of freshwater consumption would rapidly increase with population growth due to increased water consumption and expansion of the impervious area in the CoA.This study is distinctly different from other LCA studies because it includes infrastructure construction, which was a major contributor to the water system’s environmental impacts. Our results suggest that infrastructure construction should be considered in LCA studies for centralized water systems. It is worth noting, however, that European datasets were used to determine emissions and resource use related to infrastructure. Results would be more accurate if inventory datasets for US infrastructure were available.
Starting Page	880
Ending Page	891
Page Count	12
File Format	PDF
ISSN	09483349
Journal	The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment
Volume Number	20
Issue Number	6
e-ISSN	16147502
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Publisher Date	2015-03-24
Publisher Place	Berlin, Heidelberg
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Centralized water system City of Atlanta Freshwater ecosystem impact Life cycle assessment Separate sewer system TRACI Urban water system Environment Environmental Economics Environmental Engineering/Biotechnology Environmental Chemistry
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Environmental Science

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
5	Website/Portal (Helpdesk)	Queries regarding NDLI and its services	support@ndl.gov.in
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7	National Digital Library of India Club (NDLI Club)	Queries related to NDLI Club formation, support, user awareness program, seminar/symposium, collaboration, social media, promotion, and outreach	clubsupport@ndl.gov.in
8	Digital Preservation Centre (DPC)	Assistance with digitizing and archiving copyright-free printed books	dpc@ndl.gov.in
9	IDR Setup or Support	Queries related to establishment and support of Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) and IDR workshops	idr@ndl.gov.in

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