Application of multi-criteria analysis for selecting the most sustainable industrial wastewater treatment technology

Water security is critically threatened by global pressures, making sustainable industrial wastewater management a paramount challenge. This study offers a novel, data-driven assessment of industrial wastewater treatment technologies via a critical and comprehensive Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA). Conventional and emerging technologies are rigorously compared across four key sustainability parameters: treatment efficiency, energy consumption, environmental impact, and operational costs. The novelty of this research is two-fold: first, the interrelation between energy consumption and operational costs is critically quantified, offering a more realistic economic assessment; second, the MCA findings are utilized to propose innovative, integrated treatment train strategies tailored to specific wastewater characteristics, moving beyond simple ranking to practical implementation. The analysis robustly identified Reverse Osmosis (RO), as the most sustainable single technology. The resulting integrated approaches provide new insights for maximizing resource recovery and serve as a strategic decision-making tool for achieving holistic industrial water sustainability.