Quantifying the sustainability impacts of circular water practices is essential for guiding decision-making, policy development, and promoting accountability. Smart monitoring tools and frameworks enable real-time data collection and analysis, enhancing the ability to track progress and optimize circular water systems. This track focuses on methodologies for assessing and monitoring sustainability impacts.
Quantifying the sustainability impacts of circular water practices is essential for guiding decision-making, policy development, and promoting accountability. Smart monitoring tools and frameworks enable real-time data collection and analysis, enhancing the ability to track progress and optimize circular water systems. This track focuses on methodologies for assessing and monitoring sustainability impacts.
Sustainability Impact Assessment and Smart Decision-Making for Decarbonising Industrial Clusters
02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2025/05/27 12:00:00 UTC - 2025/05/27 13:30:00 UTC
The transition to a water-smart economy and society requires robust decision-support frameworks that integrate sustainability impact assessment with actionable strategies for practitioners. As European policies drive the decarbonization of industrial clusters to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, identifying viable transition pathways becomes imperative. Industries are under increasing pressure to set ambitious sustainability agendas, but the complexity of choosing the right interventions often results in delays in decision-making. Industrial stakeholders must navigate a complex landscape of circularity, water, and energy investments while ensuring that decisions align with long-term sustainability goals and avoid costly missteps. A key challenge lies in equipping decision-makers with the right tools to balance cost, risk, and sustainability impact while ensuring a just and efficient energy transition. Addressing this challenge, WEI is developing a Decision Support Tool (DST) tailored for the industrial cluster in the port of Rotterdam. This DST will aid in the systematic evaluation of decarbonization strategies, particularly focusing on waste heat recovery, electrification of industrial processes, and circularity in water and energy use. A participatory approach is central to the tool’s development, ensuring that local stakeholders, including industries, policymakers, and researchers, are actively engaged. The Community of Practice established under the WATER-MINING project is playing a crucial role in data collection and stakeholder collaboration, fostering knowledge exchange and co-creation of sustainability solutions. This engagement will enhance the DST’s applicability, ensuring that it aligns with the operational realities and strategic priorities of industrial actors. To further support decision-making, WEI is currently implementing the Best-Worst Method (BWM), a mainstream Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Method (MCDM). The utilization of BWM enables the evaluation of alternatives based on criteria weights that reflect the interests and strategies of the involved stakeholders. This highly participatory approach ensures that the preferences and priorities of stakeholders are accurately captured and integrated into the decision framework. To accommodate the real-world dynamism, the developed framework's modular design allows for incorporating additional alternatives and criteria, making it adaptable to evolving decision contexts. The insights gained from this initiative will contribute to the broader discussions in this session by offering a tangible example of how sustainability impact assessment can inform smart decision-making.
Ellen Tuinman Reliability Improvement Manager, Westlake Epoxy
A Harmonised Sustainability Assessment Framework
Oral presentationSustainability impact assessment and smart monitoring02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2025/05/27 12:00:00 UTC - 2025/05/27 13:30:00 UTC
A Harmonised Sustainability Assessment Framework (HSAF) was developed and tested on different case studies explored during the Water-Mining project, ranging from the desalination to the urban and industrial wastewater treatment sectors. HASF incorporates or circular economy metrics, with traditional sustainability dimensions (environmental, economic and social), allowing to report on the progress of a system’s sustainability performance while expanding the scope to include circular practices. The framework incorporates environmental, social, economic and circular methodologies to assess the performance of the systems, as well as a classification approach for defining circular and linear flows. Environmental performance is measured following the International Standard Organisation (ISO) 14040 and 14044 for Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (E-LCA), social LCA (S-LCA) follows the same systematic approach and framework as E-LCA, in line with S-LCA guidelines, the economic performance is measured through the Life Cycle Costing (LCC) approach (ISO 15686), and circularity is measured through the ISO 59020 guidelines. The classification approach is employed for the circularity assessment as a means to assign circularity definitions (e.g. linear or circular source) to all resources involved in each system. Stakeholder views are considered for the assessment of the technologies to identify shortcomings in their sustainability and circularity aspects and support decision-making to achieve better sustainability performance. Additionally, through a sensitivity analysis different scenarios are considered. Lastly, the outcomes of each assessment are aligned with the EU’s Green Deal policy package.
Permeability is the Critical Factor Governing the Life Cycle Environmental Performance of Drinking Water Treatment Using Living Filtration Membranes
Oral presentationSustainability impact assessment and smart monitoring02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2025/05/27 12:00:00 UTC - 2025/05/27 13:30:00 UTC
Living Filtration Membranes (LFMs) are a water filtration technology that was recently developed in the lab (Technology Readiness Level 4). LFMs have shown filtration performance comparable with that of ultrafiltration, far better fouling resistance than conventional polymer membranes, and good healing capabilities. These properties give LFMs promise to address two significant issues in conventional membrane filtration: fouling and membrane damage. To integrate environmental considerations into future technology development (i.e., Ecodesign), this study assesses the life cycle environmental performance of drinking water treatment using LFMs under likely design and operation conditions. It also quantitatively ranks the engineering design and operation factors governing the further optimization of LFM environmental performance using a global sensitivity analysis. The results suggest that LFMs’ superior fouling resistance will reduce the life cycle environmental impacts of ultrafiltration by 25% compared to those of a conventional polymer membrane in most impact categories (e.g., acidification, global warming potential, and carcinogenics). The only exception is the eutrophication impact, where the need for growth medium and membrane regeneration offsets the benefits of LFMs’ fouling resistance. Permeability is the most important factor that should be prioritized in future R&D to further improve the life cycle environmental performance of LFMs. A 1% improvement in the permeability will lead to a ∼0.7% improvement in LFMs’ environmental performance in all the impact categories, whereas the same change in the other parameters investigated (e.g., LFM lifespan and regeneration frequency) typically only leads to a < 0.2% improvement.
Towards a more holistic view of marine environmental impacts of seawater desalination: The cases of Cyprus and Kuwait
Oral presentationSustainability impact assessment and smart monitoring02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2025/05/27 12:00:00 UTC - 2025/05/27 13:30:00 UTC
The global role for desalinisation is rapidly growing. Most desalination plants discharge a highly saline brine into the sea. In this paper, and based upon studies in Cyprus and Kuwait, we look at various facets of brine impacts on the marine environment, considering all levels of biological hierarchy from the level of molecules to cells, to whole organisms and to ecosystems. Particular emphasis will be given to marine chemistry, the physiology and ecology of seagrasses, macroalgal diversity and physiology, and the biodiversity of benthic invertebrates and diatoms. In a synthetic outlook, the paper will identify the frontiers for further interdisciplinary research, encompassing environmental sciences, engineering and, given the unique situation of Cyprus, also highlight geopolitical aspects.