Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment of DMSO Solvent Recovery from Hazardous Waste Water

Abstract

The protection of continuous drinking water supply is really important all over the world, also in Hungary. Many kinds of hazardous chemicals could pollute the natural water resources, arsenic is one of the most occurring pollutant in Hungary. Recently, an ethylene-vinyl alcohol copolymer based arsenic removal adsorbent has been developed. During the manufacturing process hazardous waste water is produced, which is burned in the incineration plant, so this open production process needs fresh solvent every time. However, if the different fraction of the waste water is separated by distillation both the volume of the hazardous waste water can be reduced extremely and the recovered solvent and water can be reused in the manufacturing process. Beside analytical measurements Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) was prepared to identify and compare the environmental, economic and social effects of the current technology and the new one. The results proved that the technology closed by distillation is better than the current open one in each aspect of LCSA.