Linking biophysical models and life cycle assessment to evaluate environmental tradeoffs of urban water infrastructure design
type: CreativeWork
description: Water, a limited resource even on our hydrous planet, has always been inextricably tied to the rise and fall of cities and human infrastructure. Clean, plentiful water drives our food and energy production, provides transport, and keeps humans and the environment healthy. Integrated urban water modelling and improved geospatial databases are allowing water management researchers to analyze the effects of process decisions in the water management sector on a broader scale and with higher spatiotemporal resolution than ever before. Research is driven by the desire to optimize limited resources, respond to changing user patterns, characterize the robustness of the system to climate change pressures, and define the downstream effects of new technologies. Water management decisions today not only require hydraulic and hydrologic knowledge, but also an understanding of energy production systems, environmental biochemistry, economics, and regulatory policy. Although integrated urban water models started by expanding on simple physical urban drainage models, they are now incorporating mechanisms for environmental change, social agents, and economic feedback. Although originally built to protect public health and the local aquatic environment, wastewater treatment utilities have in recent years taken on additional objectives including greenhouse gas mitigation, reducing chemical use, and reducing long-term environmental impacts due to effluent nutrients and disinfection byproducts. National policies on water quality (EU Water Framework Directive, US Clean Water Act) and electricity demand (GHG emissions targets) both cover utilities, with the goal of improving their environmental sustainability. These multiple objectives may call for conflicting operational decisions, which presents a direct tradeoff to utility decision makers—increase electricity use for treatment, or allow worse effluent quality to flow into the local environment. This thesis seeks to characterize the scal…
abstract: Water, a limited resource even on our hydrous planet, has always been inextricably tied to the rise and fall of cities and human infrastructure. Clean, plentiful water drives our food and energy production, provides transport, and keeps humans and the environment healthy. Integrated urban water modelling and improved geospatial databases are allowing water management researchers to analyze the effects of process decisions in the water management sector on a broader scale and with higher spatiotemporal resolution than ever before. Research is driven by the desire to optimize limited resources, respond to changing user patterns, characterize the robustness of the system to climate change pressures, and define the downstream effects of new technologies. Water management decisions today not only require hydraulic and hydrologic knowledge, but also an understanding of energy production systems, environmental biochemistry, economics, and regulatory policy. Although integrated urban water models started by expanding on simple physical urban drainage models, they are now incorporating mechanisms for environmental change, social agents, and economic feedback. Although originally built to protect public health and the local aquatic environment, wastewater treatment utilities have in recent years taken on additional objectives including greenhouse gas mitigation, reducing chemical use, and reducing long-term environmental impacts due to effluent nutrients and disinfection byproducts. National policies on water quality (EU Water Framework Directive, US Clean Water Act) and electricity demand (GHG emissions targets) both cover utilities, with the goal of improving their environmental sustainability. These multiple objectives may call for conflicting operational decisions, which presents a direct tradeoff to utility decision makers—increase electricity use for treatment, or allow worse effluent quality to flow into the local environment. This thesis seeks to characterize the scal…
author: Versteeg, Saskia H
language: en
keywords: Life cycle assessment (LCA) wastewater
date published: 2016-07-07T20:27:50Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:26:34Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90802