الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Phenol is a prevalent compound that exists in liquid wastes of several industries such as resins, plastics, pharmaceuticals, paint, textiles, olive mills, and petrochemicals. Phenol is carcinogenic and toxic to the human body by oral exposure even at low concentrations. The biological removal of phenol in domestic wastewater treatment plants or separate reactors is limited due to its mischievous nature to microorganisms. Therefore, many chemical methods have been recently investigated for the removal of phenol such as adsorption, photocatalysis, ozonation, distillation, oxidation, extraction, membrane, electrochemical reactions, and different forms of Fenton reaction. Many technologies have been previously evaluated for phenolic wastewater treatment, however the removal efficiency was the main performance indicator. In this work, a detailed comprehensive outlook is presented to evaluate and compare the environmental performance for removal of phenol and its transformation products based on life cycle assessment (LCA) perspective. The focus of this research was on the application of LCA to industrial wastewater treatment and phenolic wastewater was taken as an example of industrial wastewater. In this research, five technologies of phenolic wastewater treatment were studied to compare the environmental performance of them (i.e. adsorption by activated carbon (AC), electro-Fenton, solar photo-Fenton, solar photocatalysis by titanium dioxide (TiO2), and photocatalysis by a composite of titanium dioxide and activated carbon (TiO2/AC)). The main objective of this study is design of reactors for different processes, constructing the inventory for the treatment process, life cycle analysis for the different processes, evaluating and comparing the environmental impacts and the economic aspects associated with the different five methods and determining the optimum process. The results provide that solar photo-Fenton process is the most environmentally friendly technology, the electro-Fenton process revealed the highest impacts, the costliest technology is electro-Fenton and the most affordable technology is adsorption. |