Economic and environmental assessment of water reuse in industrial parks: case study based on a Model Industrial Park

Abstract

Industrial wastewater reuse is a major measure to mitigate the depletion of available freshwater resources in the catchments around industrial areas and to prevent possible future water shortages and the resulting problems for industry, economy and society. Combining a set of environmental aspects and economic aspects of different wastewater treatment technologies, the authors developed a model-based approach for planning and evaluating water reuse concepts in industrial parks. This paper is based on an exemplary Model Industrial Park. The results based on data primarily calculated for Germany show that, for the majority of the indicators, the installation of the Water Reuse Plant seems to be beneficial for all examined reuse options. Considering the economic dimension, due to economies of scale, reuse options with larger volumes of treated water are preferable since the costs per m3 of reuse water are reduced by up to 33%. On the other hand, the environmentally preferable option depends on the respective indicator, e.g. for freshwater eutrophication, the higher the reuse factor, the lower the impact, leading to reductions between 8 and 12%. For climate change, the best option is dependent on the reuse purpose leading to reductions between 8 and 52%.