Avaliação do ciclo de vida do processo de tratamento de efluente em indústria têxtil no Rio Grande do Norte

Abstract

The textile and apparel industry is recognized for its global relevance in the economy. In the same way, it also shows itself as one of the most impactful to the environment, since fashion consumption has a fast and fleeting cycle, in which new trends emerge all the time, mainly influenced by the speed of the technological world in which it is inserted. The impact caused by this industry happens in different scales of its chain, not only in the large volume of waste and garbage it generates, but also from its production, where processes such as the processing of knitwear, fabrics, trims, or the pieces themselves, in order to add value, require a high consumption of water, dyes, and pigments. Thus, these processes generate effluents that, to be discarded, need previous treatments, both physical-chemical and biological. Life Cycle Assessment has emerged as an effective environmental management tool by quantitatively demonstrating the environmental impacts of a process or product. In this context, the objective of this work is to perform the Life Cycle Assessment of the effluent treatment process of a textile industry located in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, in order to determine what is the main source of environmental impacts of the process. The functional unit chosen was one cubic meter of raw effluent. The Life Cycle Assessment was performed in the software SimaPro 9.4, following the ISO 14040 standard. In the categories of climate change, freshwater and marine eutrophication the greatest impact came from the flocculant used in the process, anionic polyacrylamide. The coagulant, aluminum polychloride, had the worst environmental performance among the process elements in the mineral resource scarcity and human toxicity (cancer) categories. The sulfuric acid used to neutralize the raw effluent had the highest environmental impact in the ecotoxicity and human toxicity (non-cancer) categories. Finally, the elements with the least impact on this process were cation resin and energy, the latter being the least impactful.