Water footprint calculation: application to urban water cycle

摘要

Water use impact assessment, also named water footprint, has an increasing interest and thus methodologies are quickly evolving within the frame of life cycle assessment. In this work, we proposed to apply an adaptation of Ridoutt and Pfister (Int J Life Cycle Assess 18(1):201- 207, 2013) methodology to address both consumptive and degradative use of water for several options of urban water cycle management. We implemented several new endpoints such as ecotoxicity and human toxicity from USEtox, and aquatic acidification from IMPACT2002+. The assessment encompassed the life cycle of three urban water cycle scenarios. The functional unit was the distribution of one cubic meter of water to users.