Internalizing Environmental, Capital, and Energy Cost in Optimization Functions - The Case of Wastewater Treatment

摘要

Internalization of environmental, capital, and energy cost in optimization functions exhibits several difficulties arising form the fact that each one of them stands on different grounds. In the present work, we deal with the case of wastewater treatment installation associated with upstream and downstream subsystems, considering the whole system as a superstructure. This integrated system has as constituents all subsystems that either participate with their own (partial) costs or contribute in integration by transferring such costs from one subsystem to another. In the case of wastewater treatment superstructure we distinguish four subsystems interconnected in series: (I) the industrial unit producing the wastewater; (II) the pollutant abatement installation; (III) the waterbody receiving processed effluent from the installation; (IV) the downstream user of the waterbody (e.g., for agricultural or industrial purposes). Subsequently, we develop a methodological framework under the form of an algorithmic procedure, with the following 25 activity stages and 6 decision nodes that enables total cost synthesis and sharing to subsystems, according to the Pareto improvement criterion. A case example is presented, referring to additional cost minimization for providing irrigation water to subsystem IV (a procedure involving subsystems II and III, as well), in order to prove the functionality of the proposed methodology.