Battery electric vehicles (BEV) as opposed to internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV) are seen as a viable solution for reducing transportation related environmental impacts. There are however advantages and disadvantages to both alternatives. Environmental life cycle assessments (LCA) are used to quantify the environmental lifecycle impact of these vehicles. The social impact for people in the value chain of these alternatives has not yet been tested. For this purpose, a social lifecycle assessment (S-LCA) can be conducted. This paper compares BEVs and ICEVs in a S-LCA according to the UNEP/SETAC guidelines, using the Product Social Impact Life Cycle Assessment database (PSILCA). It was found that overall, the ICEV seems to have lower levels of social risk related to the life cycle than the BEV has. These differences are smaller or opposite when the lifetime of both vehicles is assumed to be longer. The raw material extraction seems to be a hotspot for social risks, especially the extraction of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo has high risk levels. The paper includes the assessment of a future end of life scenario where BEV batteries are recycled. Recycling could reduce the amount of social risk related to the BEV. The utility of the PSILCA for this case and the general cost sensitivity of this method was discussed. It was concluded that while the PSILCA is useful to provide insights in social risks related to a products lifecycle and uncovering hotspots, it is not very suitable to compare product systems where a high number of assumptions are made. The results of this study should therefore not be used for generalisations.

Global water-related impacts are in constant aggravation due to climate change, increased water demand, intensive human activities, and deterioration of the quality of water bodies.
Under this paradigm, humanity must adapt and implement measures to ensure both the quality of water bodies and the sustainable management of resources.
As a result, unexploited water resources, such as wastewater, have been a focus of attention among researchers. Wastewater Treatment (WWT) technologies stand as an important step to promote water reuse and potentially recover raw materials with added value.
While WWT technologies have been assessed at the environmental and economic levels, their social repercussions are not extensively studied. Hence, the present master thesis project resorts to the Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) framework to execute an evaluation of the social performance of an innovative WWT system for resource recovery in Portugal. S-LCA was conducted at the organizational level, assessing the social performance of organizations in the value chain through the evaluation of the social effects on Workers, Consumers, Local Community, Society, and value chain actors. In addition, a generic assessment was performed to identify hotspot areas of the Portuguese water sector, following the S-LCA framework.
The systems under analysis integrate a Water Mining (WM) project case study, where an innovative urban WWT technology is implemented. In the two systems defined, the wastewater is treated with the Nereda technology and safely discharged into the environment. Nevertheless, while in the reference system the sludge generated from the treatment is stored or forwarded to landfill, in the novel system a new biobased raw material is recovered.
Regarding the generic assessment, a total of eleven impact subcategories were listed as critical areas regarding the operation of companies in the WWT sector. These were further investigated in the site-specific assessment conducted at the plant level. The results of the site-specific assessment indicate that the organisations included in the assessment performed well for both
systems under analysis. However, organizations’ individual performances reflect that improvements are necessary mainly in the subcategories “equal opportunities/discrimination” and “community engagement”. Other subcategories where organizations need to improve are “promoting social responsibility”, “social benefits/social security”, “local employment”, “health and safety of consumers”, “safe and healthy living conditions” and “public commitment to sustainability issues”. For each organization that did not reach a satisfactory performance
level in a certain subcategory, improvement recommendations were proposed.
In general, the novel system performs better in all impact subcategories when compared to the reference system. Nonetheless, this result is intrinsically connected to system characteristics and model decisions such as weighting factors definition and multifunctionality matters, which remain as rather abstract concepts that do not completely reflect reality.
The main challenges faced during the study concern the accessibility and availability of site-specific and generic data. In terms of site-specific assessment, the high similarity of the reference and novel systems in terms of organizations involved hindered the comparison of the two systems.
To conclude, the S-LCA methodology allowed the identification of social hotpots areas as well as the evaluation of the reference and novel systems' social performance, contributing to the elaboration of strategies to improve social sustainability along the value chain of innovative WWT technologies.

Water scarcity problems will continue to exacerbate in many parts of the world, urging society to mitigate or adapt. Consequently, unconventional water resources, such as municipal wastewater, are becoming more relevant. This thesis aims to measure and evaluate the social impacts of wastewater treatment (WWT) systems potentially stemming from the social performance of organizations and social risks in the value chain. Two WWT systems are studied: one is the current WWT facility operating in La Llagosta, Barcelona, Spain (reference system), and the other is one of the case studies of the Water Mining (WM) project (original system). The WM project aims to apply innovative approaches to recover clean water and other resources from municipal and industrial wastewater and seawater.
Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) was applied to evaluate the social performances of organizations in a site-specific assessment and to assess the social risks along the systems’ value chains in a generic assessment through PSILCA. The results of the latter show that, in both systems, most risks occur in some subcategories from the “Workers”, “Local community”, “Society”, and “Value chain actors” stakeholder categories. The results of the former indicate that the organizations performed relatively well in both systems. However, improvements are needed in some subcategories. Moreover, after accounting for each organization’s share and allocating the results, the original system’s performance is better than the reference system in most subcategories. For each organization that did not achieve the acceptable level (Basic Requirement), suggestions for improvement are offered. Finally, although social performances could be linked to a product and multifunctionality could be solved, the results must be interpreted with caution in light of the limitations of S-LCA. Further research is needed for the assessment of the social implications of circular systems.

Over the past few decades, sustainable development has become one of society's most important challenges. In an effort to become sustainable, many companies experience an increasing need to measure, manage and improve the negative economic, environmental and social impacts caused by their organizational behavior along corporate supply chains and product life cycles. Sustainability performance assessment methods are a means for business decision-makers to meet such needs. While sustainability performance assessment methods for economic and environmental dimensions are well-developed, the social dimension of sustainability is lacking in that regard. Social sustainability entails issues such as equity and human rights of company stakeholders such as employees, customers, local community members, value chain actors and society. There is an increasing concern to incorporate social sustainability by businesses so as to become sustainable in all three dimensions; however, an empirical tool is needed to for measuring the social impacts of the company operations and making improvements. The Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) tool was developed for the assessment of the social dimension of sustainability in a meaningful way for application in the business world. United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Society for Environmental Toxicologists and Chemists (SETAC) developed S-LCA Guidelines and Methodological Sheets in 2009 and 2013, respectively, for assessing the social impacts of products and services across the life cycle. The UNEP/SETAC S-LCA methodological framework has been considered the “landmark in the field” of social sustainability assessment because it provides a view of the value chain, an aspect lacking in other social sustainability assessment tools. Even with recent increasing publications by S-LCA practitioners, however, S-LCA is still at an early stage of research and the UNEP/SETAC Guidelines leave a lot of room for interpretation. Thus, it is urged to conduct more research in the field of S-LCA, and a main way to contribute to its further development is through case studies. This research aims to contribute in this way by developing and applying a S-LCA methodology to a case study of the ZERO BRINE project in the Netherlands. The ZERO BRINE project is a European Union-funded partnership that works on zero liquid discharge technology for water, salt and magnesium recovery from brine effluents in the chemical process industry. The main objective of this thesis is to assess the social sustainability performances of the organizations in the ZERO BRINE system in the Netherlands using the UNEP/SETAC S-LCA framework as a reference, so as to determine the social impacts associated with the project as well as to contribute to the further development of the S-LCA methodology. Despite some limitations, in general, the approach proposed in this thesis succeeds in providing a profile of social sustainability which highlights the social hotspot areas that need improvements along the value chain. The results of the case study show the potential social hotspots in the ZERO BRINE chain, which should be considered when implementing the ZERO BRINE project. Personalized recommendations are offered per organization on how those hotspots can be improved. In this way, the advice may be valuable for members of management of the organizations wishing to increase the social sustainability of the business. In particular, the ZERO BRINE system may show a more positive social sustainability outcome if the recommendations of this thesis are implemented strategically.

Zero Emission Fuel (ZEF) has the goal to create affordable high-grade methanol, produced from absorbed carbon dioxide and water from the air. The methanol is produced in a solar methanol (MeOH) farm, consisting of 13225 micro-plants which are powered by PhotoVoltaicsolar panels (PV panels). The solar capacity of the solar MeOH farm is 12 MW and produces 7.8 tons of grade AA methanol per day (grade AA methanol has a purity of 99.8%). One of the main goals of ZEF is to produce methanol with a smaller environmental impact compared to the currently commonly used production methods. A part of the research focuses on an advice for the type of PV panels to use. The main goal of the research is to determine the environmental impact of methanol produced by the solar MeOH farm. The results lead to an advice for ZEF concerning reducing their environmental impact, also the research advises on further research.
To determine the environmental impact a life cycle assessment (LCA) is performed according to ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 standards, using the ReCiPe 2016 method. The midpoint impact categories researched are the global warming potential (GWP), the mineral resource scarcity, and the fossil resource scarcity. The functional unit of the LCA is one ton methanol. A set of assumptions is made concerning the solar MeOH farm, which are tested in the sensitivity analyses. A second LCA is performed, which compares different PV technologies. This LCA focuses on the endpoint impact categories, and the goal of this LCA is to show which PV technologies have the least environmental impact. The PV technology with the smallest environmental impact, polycrystalline silicon PV panels, is used in the LCA concerning the solar MeOH farm. One ton of methanol produced by the solar MeOH farm has a GWP of -835 ± 50 (6.5%) kg CO₂ equivalent, proving that the methanol produced by ZEF absorbs CO2. When the end-use of methanol is included, approximately 40% of the methanol produced by ZEF should be used for the production of plastic and chemicals to produce zero-emission methanol. After 7.9 ± 0.8 years of production, the solar MeOH farm has reached the CO₂ break-even point. The mineral resource scarcity of one ton methanol produced by the solar MeOH farm is 10.7 ± 0.7 (6.3%) kg Cu equivalent, the fossil resource scarcity is 127 ± 13 (10%) kg oil equivalent, and the energy payback time (EPT) is 6.9 ± 0.7 years of methanol production. The most crucial factor that influences the environmental impact is the amount of equivalent sun hour (ESH), therefore, the solar MeOH farm should operate on a location with a high amount of ESH to decrease the environmental impact. A 1% decrease of micro-plant efficiency increases the environmental impact with more than 1%. The recommendation is to focus on lifetime and efficiency when designing new subsystems, since lifetime is a more important factor than the materials used.

The water crisis is one of the most important global risks influencing humanity. Urbanization as well as economic, social and technological evolution have led to water overconsumption across the world and thus to water scarcity. Industry comprises one of the main water consumers along with agriculture and municipalities. At the same time, industry constitutes a significant water polluter since a large amount of its wastewater does not receive treatment prior to its disposal to the environment. One of the greatest sources of wastewater is brine effluent, a hypersaline concentrate created during the water treatment in the industries. In an effort to tackle the challenges that brine effluent imposes, both in terms of management and costs, the process industry should shift to technical solutions that foster sustainable development. There are three dimensions with respect to sustainability; the environmental, the economic and the social. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as well as Life Cycle Costing (LCC), both of which are the main axis of this thesis, are tools for identifying and analyzing environmental and economic impacts respectively. The object of this thesis is the Zero Brine (ZB) project which promotes a closed-loop approach to address the complex brine effluents by eliminating them, mitigating the effects of industrial processes while recovering materials such as water, energy, minerals, magnesium, and salts. This research is focusing on the Dutch case study where the assessment of a demineralized water production system before and after the implementation of ZB applications is taking place. The evaluation of sustainability performance comprises one of the main goals of this project. Thus, this thesis aims to assess the environmental and economic sustainability of the ZB project by implementing the LCA and LCC techniques. To that end, the parallel implementation of LCA and LCC was performed. Furthermore, the three types of LCC; conventional (cLCC), environmental (eLCC) and societal (sLCC), were also included in the analysis. The results of the analysis showed that the implementation of the ZB system has ambiguous results concerning environmental performance. On the one hand, the majority of the environmental impacts were decreased by 15% to 22%, On the other hand, global warming, acidification as well as particulate matter formation categories were sharply increased by more than 100%. From the economic assessment results, it was concluded that the application of ZB design is not financially viable since it degrades the economic performance of the current production scheme. By estimating the NPV after the implementation of ZB applications, it was observed that it is negative thus rendering the project unsustainable Overall, to enhance the environmental and economic performance of ZB applications, more research required to tackle the abovementioned issues and to render ZB project a sustainable, industrially applicable solution for the treatment of brine and the recovery of valuable resources.

Wastewater production has been steadily increasing globally. Treatment of wastewater and the resulting sludge is crucial for human health and ecosystem conservation. Furthermore, water supply and treatment is an energy intensive sector where the electricity consumption is projected to increase by more than 80% in the next 25 years.

Sludge treatment is one of the few processes in the water sector where energy can be recovered. And with the environmental issues faced by the sludge treatment sector, it becomes essential to not only optimize the energy recovery but also to holistically analyze environmental impacts of sludge treatment technologies. Thus helping to reduce the human and environmental impact to a minimum. In this report, the current sludge treatment chain in the Netherlands was environmentally analyzed along with two promising technologies, plasma gasification and supercritical water gasification for sewage sludge treatment using lifecycle assessment methodology. The end use of the produced syngas in a gas engine and solid oxide fuel cell was also modeled to find their maximum energy generation potential which is also technologically feasible. Furthermore, impact of anaerobic digestion of sludge in combination with the mentioned technologies was also studied resulting in a total of 9 systems. Literature review and macro modeling of the mentioned systems are used to determine the inputs and outputs over their entire lifecycle. Results from this study show that under the modeled conditions, supercritical water gasification has the potential to considerably reduce environmental impacts since it performed better than other thermochemical conversion technologies in all impact categories. This was primarily due to high energy recovery and relatively clean syngas produced. Furthermore, anaerobic digestion still produced the highest net energy per ton of sludge processed without requiring secondary fuel input. Due to large amount of energy required for drying sewage sludge and material intensive fluegas
cleaning, plasma gasification did not offer promising results for sewage sludge treatment. It can still however offer substantial benefits over incineration especially for waste treatment of feedstock with lower moisture content. Solid oxide fuel cell was the environmentally preferred option over gas engine for electricity generation from syngas due to low nitrous oxide emissions combined with higher energy recovery. Results in literature have shown safe short
term combination of gasifier-solid oxide fuel cell. However, uncertainties with the respect to its long term reliability still remain. Energy generation volatility with respect to the scale of anaerobic digestion and feedstock properties for supercritical water gasification performance present two possible sources of
uncertainties to the above results. The electricity generation from anaerobic digestion is only economically feasible for capacities of 30,000 population equivalents or higher. Whereas, energy generation and consequently the environmental performance of supercritical water gasification is highly dependent on dry solids content. However, with considerable effort going into research and process optimization, this uncertainty can be eliminated soon.