Environmental and economic analysis of an olive mill wastewater treatment system integrated with microalgae production

Olive mill wastewater raises environmental concerns due to the presence of pollutants and phytotoxic compounds. This study aims to evaluate the environmental performance of an integrated process that recycles olive mill wastewater while concurrently producing Arthrospira platensis for food applications. The quantification of the environmental impact is conducted using the life cycle assessment methodology. The environmental burden of the proposed integrated system is also compared with that of alternative wastewater treatment solutions and growing medium for microalgae cultivation considering different functional units. Eventually, a simplified economic analysis of the proposed integrated system is carried out, as a complement of the environmental assessment, to evaluate its economic competitiveness considering different market scenarios. LCA characterisation results have been obtained for a set of reference scenarios using EF 3.0. The set of normalisation and weighting factors of the EF 3.0 impact assessment method is used for comparing various scenarios. In terms of aggregated score, the integrated system can reduce the environmental impact by 75.95