Recycling

Biography

Biography: Khaoula Masmoudi

Abstract

Nowadays, the increasing demand for fresh water obliged the international community to react rapidly and find effective solutions to overcome this problem. The implementation of sustainable development strategies all over the world reflects the growth of awareness about different changes in our environment such as the climate change which was the subject of the conference of parties (COP 21) in Paris in December 2015. 195 parties were met in order to develop a universal agreement able to maintain a warming of 2°C until 2100 [1].This tense situation governed by the increase of the pollution, made that wastewater recovery and reuse using innovative technologies environmentally friendly is widely encouraged. The textile industry is among the industries which have a harmful impact on the environment since it requires the use of high volume of water and chemical products. According to the Agency for the promotion of industry and innovation (API) in Tunisia, the textile industry is the leader sector in terms of the total number of companies 32% and job offers 34%. The goal of this Life Cycle Assessment study was to assess the environmental benefits and drawbacks of an advanced oxidation process (AOP) which is the TFFBR used for the treatment of textile effluent in comparison with a coagulation flocculation process. The life cycle impact assessment is carried out based on the ISO 14040 series of standards using the software SimaPro 8 (Pre Consultants BV), the Ecoinvent database and the CML method which includes ten impact categories for the environmental assessment related to the climate change/global warming, depletion of abiotic resources, acidification, eutrophication, and human toxicity. The results shows that the environmental performance of TFFBR is much better than the coagulation-flocculation process. Thus, the environmental impact of TFFBR is about 86 to 99% lower depending on the impact category, with the exception of Abiotic depletion potential, for which it is 45% lower. Concerning the coagulation-flocculation process, the stage of production of the chemicals presents the highest contribution, compared to the production of electricity and transport, being responsible of more than 95% of the whole impact in all impact categories.