Environmental analysis and evaluation of the production and application of polymer flocculant in wastewater treatment

The purpose of the research described in the article was to evaluate the environmental impact of flocculants produced from polystyrene waste using the Live Cycle Assessement (LCA) technique. The study was conducted in two stages: stage I was to evaluate the environmental impact of the production of a new flocculant, and stage II was to evaluate the environmental impact of the flocculant used for wastewater treatment. The study was conducted using the software: SimaPro Developer v. 9.4.0.2, characterization was developed using the EF 3.0 v.1.03 method recommended by the European Commission (EC). Previous technological studies have shown that the resulting flocculants can be used to support the coagulation process of industrial wastewater as weights to facilitate sludge agglomeration and sedimentation. In this work, the LCA method was used to analyse the energy consumption required for the flocculant production process and the subsequent process of industrial wastewater treatment using this flocculant. The LCA analysis showed that the environmental burden associated with the use, for the treatment of industrial wastewater, of flocculants synthesized from waste, especially in the raw mineral category, is significantly lower than when using traditional flocculants. The use of photovoltaic electricity (instead of energy produced from coal) results in a 30-fold reduction in the environmental impact of the flocculant production process, which translates into a reduction in the environmental impact of wastewater treatment of about 13 %.