Israel's National Level LCA of Potable Water Supply System

For many years severe water scarcity in Israel has been a driver for the development of advanced water technologies. High quality water supply throughout the entire country has been made possible through a vast and complex... [ view full abstract ]

For many years severe water scarcity in Israel has been a driver for the development of advanced water technologies. High quality water supply throughout the entire country has been made possible through a vast and complex water supply system, supplying high quality water supply across the country. The contribution of the Israeli advanced water supply system to past and present development of agriculture and industry are well known. However, less known is the associated environmental impacts of the Israeli water system.

This study generates Israel's LCI dataset of tap water in order to assess associated environmental impacts. Our LCA study of the tap water in Israel covers the entire value chain of the country’s highly complex water supply system. It includes: water extraction and production from a variety of sources such as groundwater, surface water, brackish water and sea water; water treatment; desalination; a national transmission system, which runs throughout the entire country; distribution and tertiary treatment of wastewater for water reclamation. The study comprises data collection for all components of the Israeli water system, resulting in the first national level LCA of tap water. The collected data is related to energy and chemical consumption, materials for infrastructure, and transportation of materials. The data collection process introduced major challenges such as: difficulties of access to data sources, in particular private data sources, limited availability of old data and non-aggregated data, and incompatibility of data from various sources. Our approach to resolve these challenges included stakeholder engagement and data processing.

The study used the ReCiPe method to assess the impacts of the system on climate change, water depletion, freshwater and marine water eutrophication, and terrestrial and water acidification. The environmental impacts of the Israeli water supply system are high comparing to published LCAs of other water supply systems (e.g. 2.3 kg CO₂-eq /m³ vs. a range of 0.12-3.4 kg CO₂/m³ and mean value of 0.85 kg CO₂-eq/m³ reported in previous studies). The main impacting processes in most of the environmental categories are the reverse-osmosis desalination of sea water and the long and energy intensive transmission and distribution system. Normalization of scores showed that marine and freshwater ecotoxicity are the most important categories. A scenario where more renewable energy sources isused to produce electricity resulted in significant reduction of environmental impacts of the supply of water systems.