Life Cycle Assessment for Remediation Technologies Application to Groundwater Contaminated with Chlorinated Volatile Organic Compounds
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Lin, Jung-Yuan
Abstract
The increasing incidents of soil and groundwater contamination caused by abandon factories in recent years had resulted in environmental impact on the surrounding neighborhoods. Most contamination incidents were due to improper use of chlorinated organic solvents in chemical, electronics and plastic factories. The Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) has been actively sought responsibility of the land owner or land management to conduct soil and groundwater contamination improvement and remediation to allow the underground environment returns to its original function.
This research based on the pilot test results of the case study sites and utilized the IMPACT 2002+ modules of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software, SimaPro 7.2 to evaluate environmental impact during Midpoint and Endpoint of contamination remediation among the four groundwater contamination remediation technologies including, Pump and Treat, Groundwater Circulation Wells (GCW), Enhanced Reductive Dechlorination and In-situ Chemical Oxidation (ISCO). The scope of the assessment includes the estimation of material and energy consumption of each groundwater contamination remediation technologies being applied alone. And the functional unit was set as decreasing the concentration of trichloroethylene (TCE) to below the second category of the Taiwan Groundwater Pollution Control Standards (0.05mg/L/).
Characterization results of the implementation stage of the sites remediation illustrated that that Enhanced Reductive Dechlorination technology caused the greatest impact on human health, ecological system quality, climate change and resources hazard. ISCO is of less impact and followed by Pump and Treat. GCW would cause the least impact on environment. Standardization results and individual point results indicated that Enhanced Reductive Dechlorination technology has the highest ranking of impact on each impact hazard types, followed but ISCO, third would be Pump and Treat and the forth was GCW and which was similar to the characterization results. The result implies that the more material was applied during groundwater well installations the greater impact would be caused to the environment.
Based on characterization results after completion of remediation, ISCO poses the greatest impact to the environment than Pump and Treat. The third ranking was GCW followed by the Enhanced Reductive Dechlorination technology. The standardization and characterization results indicated ISCO caused the greatest impact, followed by Pump and Treat and GCW. The Enhanced Reductive Dechlorination caused the least impact, however, the ecological impact of Enhanced Reductive Dechlorination was similar to GCW.
This LCA of groundwater remediation technologies is limited to the estimation made based on pilot test results of each case study sites and the site specific characteristics. Hence, it would not be enough to represent environmental impact of such remediation technology being applied on other remediation sites.
Subjects
Chlorinated organics
Goundwater contamination remediation
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
Type
thesis
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