Bibliometric analysis of the life cycle applied to wastewater treatment processes with microalgae

This work carried out a bibliometric correlation analysis between keywords related to life cycle analysis (LCA) and wastewater treatment systems, seeking to identify the relevance of treatment with microalgae. The biomass of these microorganisms allows the valori-zation of the residual effluent since it can be used to obtain energy through the biogas generated in the digestion of anaerobic reactors and as a potential source to produce metabolites of high industrial value. Most of the LCAs obtained in the search use refe-rence flows such as the amount of biomass produced, the volume of water treated, and the equivalents produced per person. The most frequently reported functional units are 1 m3 of treated wastewater and produced wastewater per population equivalents. The predominant tool for developing LCAs corresponded to the SimaPro software, applying the ReCiPe impact methodology.