Almudena Hospido

• Chemical and Environmental Engineering PhD
• Professor at University of Santiago de Compostela

El capítulo presenta las perspectivas y reflexiones del libro, centrado en los aspectos metodológicos claves para la adecuada aplicación de los enfoques de ciclo de vida a la gestión de los recursos hídricos.

Salinity is changing in aquatic systems due to anthropogenic activities (like irrigation or dam management) and climate change. Although there are studies on the effects of salinity variations on individual species, little is known about the effects on overall ecosystems, these impacts being more uncertain in transitional waters such as estuaries o...

Desde la primera hasta la última hoja, el libro destaca el concepto y el significado transversal de la internacionalización de la educación superior, con el fin de comprender, desde diversas visiones, algunas de las implicaciones de la dimensión internacional en la formación universitaria.

Background Globally, climate change is a challenge for the dairy sector and its effects are expected to have important consequences on the environmental performance of the dairy products value chains. At the same time, this sector significantly contributes to global warming and other environmental impacts. Scope and approach This paper addresses t...

Saline Mussels Cooking Wastewater was valorised to produce PHA with Mixed Microbial Cultures (MMC). Due to the high protein content (1.8 – 5.7 g CODPROT/L), PHA accumulating capacity was below 10 %, so several strategies were tested. In the acidification unit, Na(HCO3) was added, increasing protein conversion into Volatile Fatty Acids (VFA) from 10...

Biobased and biodegradable materials such as polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) have great potential as an alternative for conventional oil-based plastics in consumer goods and medical applications, but their total market share is still marginal due to their high production costs. Downstream processing, with high energy demand and significant requirements...

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) are biodegradable polymers with renewable origin that are expected to substitute conventional petrochemical plastics. However, before they are commercialized, life-cycle environmental validation is needed, to prove that there is an actual benefit with the replacement of non-renewable plastics with PHA. Nowadays, environm...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been widely applied in the wastewater industry, but inconsistencies in assumptions and methods has made it difficult for researchers and practitioners to synthesize results from across studies. This paper presents a critical review of published LCAs related to municipal wastewater management with a focus on developin...

The development and use of composite indexes has exploded in the last 15 years as a tool to summarise the large amount of information available nowadays. To ensure that composite indicators reflect faithfully the purpose of evaluation and are widely accepted and used, the users must understand the relationship between individual sub-indicators and...

Sewage sludge handling is becoming a concern in Europe due to its increasing amount and the presence of contaminants, such as heavy metals and pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs). Currently, over 70% of sludge in Europe is treated thermally by incineration or used as fertilizer in agriculture. New thermo- chemical methods are under de...

Given the increasing importance of the wastewater sector in terms of energy usage, the understanding of the level of energy efficiency of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is useful to both the industry itself as well as policy makers. Here, based on economic foundations, we apply a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) approach for energy demand mo...

Wastewater treatment is an essential public service that has a major impact on energy use in the urban water cycle, thus receiving increasing attention in context of the Water-Energy Nexus. Understanding the current energy use for wastewater is an essential step to design reliable policies promoting a more efficient use of resources. This paper dev...

A novel standard methodology for WWTPs energy efficiency estimation is presented. • The methodology is based on KPIs that reflect the plant function (s). • The methodology allows benchmarking and diagnosing energy hotspots. • A case study illustrates the procedure to carry out an energy analysis. This paper describes the first methodology specifica...

Normalisation is an optional step in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), often used in decision making since it helps interpreting the results of LCA studies with regard to some reference information. The applicable ISO standard recommends considering different reference systems to guarantee the robustness of the normalisation step, and so the availabilit...

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is an urgent and internationally shared target. One of the existing measures to do so is carbon offsetting through afforestation. However, when designing afforestation projects meant to act as carbon sinks, the remaining environmental issues are usually overlooked, with the potential risk of shifting enviro...

This article examines the potential benefits of using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for conducting energy-efficiency assessment of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). WWTPs are characteristically heterogeneous (in size, technology, climate, function …) which limits the correct application of DEA. This paper proposes and describes the Robust Ener...

On a previous study, the carbon footprint (CF) of all production and consumption activities of Galicia, an Autonomous Community located in the north-west of Spain, was determined and the results were used to devise strategies aimed at the reduction and mitigation of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The territorial LCA methodology was used there...

Aims: Foods and drinks are major contributors (17%) to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by private consumption in Europe. The carbon footprint (CF) of a certain product expresses the total GHG emissions over its whole life cycle, and its calculation for foodstuff is a necessary first step to reduce their contribution to global warming. Th...

Sludge generation is currently one of the most important issues for sewage treatment plants in Chile. In this work, the life cycle environmental impacts of four sludge management scenarios were studied, focusing on the comparison of current practices and advanced anaerobic digestion (AD) using a sequential pre-treatment (PT). The results show that...

The application of granular activated carbon (GAC) filters as post-treatment to remove 18 organic micropollutants (OMPs) in secondary effluents coming from integrated biological systems with membrane (SIAM) or secondary settler (SIAL) was assessed. Two GAC, from bituminous carbon (BC-GAC) and coconut shell (CS-GAC) origin, were tested. GAC filters...

The environmental and economic benefits and burdens of including the first Short Cut Enhanced Nutrient Abatement (SCENA) into a real municipal wastewater treatment plant were evaluated using life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle cost (LCC). The implications of accomplishing nitrogen (N) removal and phosphorus (P) recovery via nitrite in the si...

As the number of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) increases worldwide and the effluent quality requirements become more demanding, the issue of energy efficiency has been attracting increasing attention from an environmental and economic point of view. However, defining and measuring energy efficiency in WWTPs is still a challenge. Energy effici...

This study compares a premium brand of UHT milk, Unicla, characterised by an improved nutritional composition, to conventional milk, in terms of health effects and environmental impacts. Unlike enriched milks, in which nutrients are added to the final product, Unicla is obtained naturally by improving the diet of the dairy cows. Health effects have...

The sustainability of the use of lignocellulosic biomass to produce ethanol has been extensively studied in recent years through life cycle assessment (LCA). This work focuses on LCA of the use of alfalfa stems (Medicago sativa L.) for the production of ethanol. The analysis considers two blends of conventional gasoline with bioethanol - E10 and E8...

Bananas are among the five most important food crops in the world, after wheat, rice, maize, and potatoes and Ecuador is a major banana producer and the world's leading banana exporter. A detailed carbon footprint assessment from cradle-to-grave of the Ecuadorian banana value chain was carried out. Special effort was made to adjust the emission fac...

The environmental impacts of banana production in Ecuador are expected to be of comparable importance to its influence in the country's economy, as the agricultural sector is known to be a major contributor to climate change, and also to water consumption and pollution. The aim of this paper is the environmental analysis of the banana value chain t...

The total electricity consumption in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) corresponds to about 1% of the total electricity consumption per year of a country (Cao, 2011). Data from show that electricity demand account for about 1% of total production of the country Italy (Foladori, 2010). In Spain the electricity demand for WWTPs responds to 2-3% of...

European pilchard (Sardina pilchardus) is a commonly purchased species in Portugal and Spain, since it constitutes a cheap and healthy source of protein. Therefore, numerous final products are commercialized based on this same raw product. The current study presents a cross-product environmental analysis using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for three...

The difficulties for the complete removal of the most recalcitrant organic micropollutants in urban wastewaters with conventional treatment processes forces the promotion of new treatment technologies to solve the problem without compromising nutrient removal. The Sequencing Membrane Process with Activated Carbon reactor (SemPAC®) couples three dif...

Anaerobic co-digestion (AcoD) is established as a techno-economic profitable process by incrementing biogas yield (increased cost-efficiency) and improving the nutrient balance (better quality digestate) in comparison to mono-digestion of livestock wastes. However, few data are available on the environmental consequences of AcoD and most of them ar...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodology to generate environmental impact estimates associated with the life cycle stages of a product or process. The approach facilitates a more comprehensive outlook of the end-of-pipe process impacts, in which wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are included. Here we describe the implementation of the LCA met...

European pilchard or sardines (Sardina pilchardus) are an attractive raw material to extract from Iberian waters, since they constitute a cheap source of protein and they are a popular product among consumers. This has led to a wide range of final products available for consumers to purchase based on this single raw material. Therefore, this study...

Abstract Purpose The main objective of this paper is to analyse through life cycle assessment (LCA), the entire water services system in Iasi City (Romania): a representative city for the problems faced by the water services sector in Romania. Furthermore, the study is aimed at demonstrating the usefulness of the LCA approach as a support instrume...

Cheese production has always been the standard way of preserving milk. This is the second most consumed dairy product in Spain (ca. 6.2 kg per year and person), with more than 100 different cheeses available in the market. However, only 26 types are labelled with a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), a symbol of quality recognition. In this stud...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a technique to quantify the impacts associated with a product, service or process from cradle-to-grave perspective. Within the field of wastewater treatment (WWT) LCA was first applied in the 1990s. In the pursuit of more environmentally sustainable WWT, it is clear that LCA is a valuable tool to elucidate the broader...

The supernatant resulting from the anaerobic digestion of the sludge generated by a sewage treatment plant (STP) is a small flow in terms of volume but very relevant in terms of N and P loads. Its characteristics make it particularly suitable for technologies such as partial nitritation-anammox (CANON), nitrite shortcut (NSC) and struvite crystalli...

A total of 33 publications have been reviewed in order to determine the current state-of-the-art of LCA development in fishery based seafood production systems, focusing mainly on methodological innovations and the different assumptions that are taken into consideration in the different stages of LCA. The assessment revealed a strong proliferation...

The main objective of this paper is to present the Direct Emissions Estimation Model (DEEM), a model for the estimation of CO2 and N2O emissions from a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). This model is consistent with non-specific but widely used models such as AS/AD and ASM #1 and presents the benefits of simplicity and application over a common WW...

Thailand as one of the global food exporting countries shares the worldwide concerns on climate change and initiated carbon footprinting and labeling in 2008. Individual quick frozen fried chicken meat and canned tuna in sunflower oil were selected as the pioneering case studies for carbon footprinting using the PAS 2050:2008 standard. It was revea...

INTRODUCTION Anaerobic digestion is the biological process that makes it possible the degradation of organic matter to produce biogas and sludge. The supernatant resulting from this process presents high concentrations of both N and P but low amounts of biodegradable organic matter. Although this flow is usually sent back to the biological treatmen...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a standardized tool used to calculate the environmental impact of products and processes. However, it presents some limitations when the so-called Pharmaceutical and Personal care Products (PPCPs) are included in the analysis. The specific Characterisation Factors (CFs) for PPCPs are not completely defined in the Life...

Purpose Impacts of activities related to freshwater use are gaining interest among the life cycle assessment (LCA) community and several approaches are nowadays available in the literature. However, the general trend still is to ignore the assessment of its impact or, luckily, its inclusion on the inventory. This paper describes a procedure to inco...

Purpose Biofuels have received special research interest, driven by concerns over high fuel prices, security of energy supplies, global climate change as well as the search of opportunities for rural economic development. This work examines the production of biodiesel derived from the transesterification of crude rapeseed oil, one of the most impor...

Many studies have shown the effectiveness of pretreatments prior to anaerobic digestion of solid wastes, but to our knowledge, none analyzes their environmental consequences/costs. In this work, seven different pretreatments applied to two types of waste (kitchen waste and sewage sludge) have been environmentally evaluated by using life cycle asses...

Increasing the eco-efficiency of fishing fleets is currently a major target issue in the seafood sector. This objective has been influenced in recent years by soaring fuel prices, a fact particularly relevant to a sector whose vessels present high energy consumption rates. Efforts to minimize fuel consumption in fishing fleets result in economic be...

The objective of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is to prevent pollution. However, it is necessary to assess their sustainability in order to ensure that pollution is being removed, not displaced. In this research, the performance of 24 WWTPs has been evaluated using a streamlined Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with Eutrophication Potential (EP) a...

Alfalfa is the major forage crop produced in temperate regions worlwide. Although this crop is currently used mainly for producing high-value livestock feed, its application for bioenergy production is a recent focus of interest. Even though it is not mandatory, alfalfa is normally dried in order to improve the quality of the final product. In this...

The pulp industry plays an important role in the structure of the European economy and society. The production of pulp has been traditionally considered an important source of pollution due to the use of large amounts of chemicals, fuels, and water and its intensive energy consumption. Currently, this situation is changing due to the potential use...

The environmental and economic profile of 5 Atlantic and 19 Mediterranean WWTP was assessed using a streamlined LCA methodology with two different functional units (FU), m 3 and removed eutrophication (kg PO 4 3-removed). Results show important differences among areas due to influent load, but also indicated that both legal goals and technology use...

Available models for terrestrial eutrophication in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) only allow estimation on a country scale, being this a problem, especially in large countries with high geographical, climatic and economical variability. This work aims to estimate characterization factors for terrestrial eutrophication at a regional scale, using Galici...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is often used for the environmental evaluation of agri-food systems due to its holistic perspective. In particular, the assessment of milk production at farm level requires the evaluation of multiple dairy farms to guarantee the representativeness of the study when a regional perspective is adopted. This article shows th...

Recent life cycle assessment studies have revealed the relevance of cooling agent leakage when assessing the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated by fishing vessel operations. The goal of this communication is to update the carbon footprinting of the Galician fishing activity (NW Spain) by including the GHG emissions from cooling agent leakage....

Membrane bioreactors are one of the most outstanding and updating technologies applied for the wastewater treatment. Different configurations and combinations of technologies are possible for this purpose. However, not only the treatment capacity has to be proved, but also the environmental performance of the different alternatives has to be evalua...

The food production system as a whole is recognized as one of the major contributors to environmental impacts. Accordingly, food production, processing, transport and consumption account for a relevant portion of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with any country. In this context, there is an increasing market demand for climate-relevan...

The increasing demand for environmental information on the global warming impact of products requires a solid methodological framework which guarantees comparability and communicability. The publicly available specification PAS 2050 combines approaches to a variety of greenhouse gas specific assessment issues to deliver a globally applicable produc...

Background, aim, and scopeLife cycle assessment (LCA) has traditionally been considered a site-independent tool, but nowadays, there is a trend towards making LCA more site-dependent. Site-dependent characterization factors have been calculated for regional impact categories such as acidification, terrestrial and aquatic eutrophication, and smog. S...

At the present time, there is a remarkable increasing interest for using non-woody fibres as raw materials for pulp mills. The present study aims to identify and quantify the environmental impacts associated with the production of hemp and flax fibres for speciality paper pulp by using the Life Cycle Assessment (from now, LCA) methodology. One ton...

The environmental impact of food products occur in all nodes of the supply chain; from production of inputs to agriculture, through farming, industry and retail to households. Impacts at one node often depend on activities at other nodes, and improvement options for food industry might often involve changes that result in large savings at other nod...

Agricultural application of sewage sludge has been emotionally discussed in the last decades, because the latter contains organic micropollutants with unknown fate and risk potential. In this work, the reuse of anaerobically digested sludge in agriculture is evaluated from an environmental point of view by using Life Cycle Assessment methodology. M...

Background, aim, and scopeLife cycle assessment (LCA) was initially developed to answer questions about the environmental impact of available products and services, implying that the product system under study was possible to investigate in detail; however, if new products or processes are to be evaluated, several complications occur. So, this pape...

One of the major drawbacks of models used nowadays to calculate characterization factors for terrestrial eutrophication is the use of information at a country scale. This fact may turn to be a problem, especially in countries with large geographic, climatic and economic variability such as Russia, Sweden or Spain. Currently the only way to calculat...

Pulp industry plays an important role in the structure of European economy and society. Paper pulp manufacture, the industrial utilization of plant biomass, is increasing every year. In Spain, Eucalyptus is the dominant raw material and the Kraft cooking and total chlorine free (TCF) bleaching processes lead the procedures of Eucalyptus paper pulp...

Background, aim and scopeConsiderable debate surrounds the assessment of the environmental impacts and the ethical justification for providing a year-round supply of fresh produce to consumers in the developed countries of northern Europe. Society is seeking environmentally sustainable supply chains which maintain the variety of fresh food on offer...

In this series of articles, complete NH3 and NOx emission inventories have been calculated for the first time for Galicia (NW Spain), a region in serious danger due to the eutrophication produced by these emissions. In this first part, NH3 emissions corresponding to main sources (from agricultural and non-agricultural activities) have been estimate...

This study is the second part of a series where NH3 and NOx emission inventories for Galicia (NW Spain), a region with a great risk of eutrophication, have been developed. The principal sources of NOx emissions in Galicia and their associated uncertainty have been calculated in this paper. The results prove that industrial and mobile sources produc...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a useful tool for estimating carbon footprints of the food supply chains. This is illustrated in this paper on the case study of Christmas meal. The results show that the 'hot spots' in the system are the production and distribution of the meal ingredients, causing 86% of the carbon footprint; preparation and consumpt...

Forests play a vital role for rural as well as urban populations all over the world. They constitute an essential natural resource that provides multiple benefits to the people. The conservation and sustainable management of forests are closely linked with global issues such as food supply and environmental protection. In forest management several...

The level of development of the models used nowadays to calculate characterization factors for terrestrial eutrophication only allows their estimation at a country scale. This fact may turn to be a problem, especially in geographically large countries such as Russia, Sweden or Spain. In order to avoid this, depositions levels for NOx and NHy were m...

Advocates of ‘local food’ claim it serves to reduce food miles and greenhouse gas emissions, improve food safety and quality, strengthen local economies and enhance social capital. We critically review the philosophical and scientific rationale for this assertion, and consider whether conventional scientific approaches can help resolve the debate....

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an environmental tool which allows the calculation of all the environmental loads related to a process/product/service. In the present work, LCA was applied to analyze the environmental impact of different technologies for wastewater treatment in small populations. In this study, 13 wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs)...

España ocupa la 6ª posición en producción lechera en la Unión Europea. [1]. Dentro de España, las vacas lecheras de Galicia juegan un papel fundamental con una contribución del 30.92% [2]. De acuerdo con un estudio de producción de leche en esta región [3], la alimentación de las vacas (maíz, ensilado, pienso y alfalfa) es uno de los mayores respon...

Spain occupies the 6th position in annual milk production in the European Union [1]. Within Spain, Galician dairy cattle plays a fundamental role with a contribution of 30.92% [2]. According to an study of milk production in this region [3], cow feed (maize, silage, alfalfa and fodder) is one of the main contributors to nearly all impact categories...

Eutrophication is an impact category that figures in all the major LCA impact methodologies. Nowadays, the necessity of site-dependent factors is recognised within the LCA community. Galicia (NW Spain) is characterised by its major rivers that end in large estuaries. These ecosystems have its own aquatic dynamic, influenced by the junction of fresh...

A practical case is presented, which considers an example that uses the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, through its application to a simple case based on the evaluation of the environmental impacts associated to packaging of lubricating oil. The analysis is verified by categories of damage and types of packaging, indicating the components...

Background, Aims and ScopeIt is clear that a wastewater treatment plant brings about an enhanced quality of wastewater; however, it also implies such environmental side effects as material and energy consumption as well as involving the generation of waste. This study is maintained within the boundaries of a research project that aims at the evalua...

Growing awareness of environmental problems during recent years has led to increased demand for environmental information about seafood products. In particular, this report is an attempt to evaluate the manufacturing process of canned-tuna products. Bearing in mind the lifestyles of people in the 21st century, canned products are one of the commone...

Wood has many applications and it is often in competition with other materials. Chipboard is the most common item of wood-based materials and it has attained the highest economical development in recent years. Relevant up-to-date environmental data are needed to allow the environmental comparison of wood with other materials. There are several exam...

The environmental impacts of fishing go well beyond their direct effect on targeted stocks and associated ecosystem components and functions. Here we employ life cycle assessment (LCA) to quantify the scale and importance of emissions that result from the range of industrial activities associated with contemporary Spanish purse seine fisheries for...

Nowadays, all the processes must be analyzed from a global environmental point of view, even those that are considered treatment systems of emissions such as wastewater treatment plants (WWTP). In these plants different processes take place: energy is consumed, chemical reagents are used, sludge and emissions to the atmosphere are generated. One o...

Mastitis is defined as an inflammatory reaction of udder tissue to bacterial, chemical, thermal or mechanical injury, which causes heavy financial losses and milk wastage throughout the world. Until now, studies have focused on the economic aspects from which perspective mastitis can generally be considered as the most serious disease in dairy cows...