Proposta de um sistema de indicadores de sustentabilidade para a gestão de estações de tratamento de esgoto

• Ano de defesa: 2021
• Autor(a) principal: Freire, Renata Carlos
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Palavras-chave em Português: Tratamento de efluentes; Sustentabilidade; Indicadores de sustentabilidade; Tomada de decisão
• Link de acesso: http://www.repositorio.ufc.br/handle/riufc/63410

Wastewater treatment systems are extremely important to reduce the negative impacts that urbanization, industrialization and population growth cause on the environment and on the population served. Although, the wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) aim to reduce these impacts, some WWTPs do not provide adequate treatment, due to the lack of monitoring of their performance, for example, and end up causing numerous negative impacts on the environment. The control of WWTPs is extremely important to guarantee the quality of the receiving bodies, the minimum emission of greenhouse gases, the minimization of negative impacts on the population directly affected by the plants and the efficient use of the resources necessary for the treatment. The objective of the research is to develop a system of sustainability indicators to assist the process of evaluation, monitoring and decision making in sewage treatment plants. The specific objectives are to: i) select indicators that are relevant to WWTPs and that are in accordance with the pillars of sustainability; ii) evaluate, through consultations with experts, the importance of indicators to compose the proposed final system; and, iii) test the proposed system at two WWTP in Ceará. To this end, three steps were adopted: pre-selection of indicators; definition and validation of indicators; and, application of the system in WWTPs. The stage of validation by specialists took place in two moments using the Delphi Method, where, in the first moment, 43 specialists responded to the research and, in the second, 28 experts answered the form. The proposed final system has 23 indicators being divided into the technical, environmental, economic and social dimensions and, in addition, each indicator is defined as an indicator of the type of pressure, state, impact or response. The proposed indicator system proved to be feasible and able to assess the sustainability of WWTPs. This finding was possible in the application with treatment plants José Euclides Ferreira Gomes and Aldemir Martins, the last plant being more sustainable than the first plant. As with any indicator system, some limitations were identified as some variables were not calculated due to the lack of data and lack of clarity regarding the frequency of evaluation of the indicators. From the limitations and application, it was possible to identify that the proposed system meets the main criteria and specific objectives defined, although improvements are necessary and have been suggested for future work.