Open Collections

Saleem, Saba

University of British Columbia

Oil spill response operations are known to generate large quantities of wastes that manifold the volume of an oil spill. Management of oil spill response waste (OSRW) requires labor-intensive and costly procedures. Furthermore, high resource consumption and harmful emissions from OSRW management have detrimental effects on the environment. Hence, there is a need to pragmatically select an OSRW management strategy that is both environmentally friendly and cost-effective. This research fulfills this need by providing a novel life cycle assessment-based framework specifically designed for OSRW through a combined application of design of experiments (DOE), life cycle assessment (LCA), multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), and life cycle cost analysis (LCCA). The proposed framework is able to assess, compare, and rank environmental impacts of OSRW management strategies and guides environmentally sustainable OSRW management practices. The proposed framework makes use of three software tools (Minitab, SimaPro, and Microsoft Excel) to generate results. The framework is applied to state-of-practice OSRW management strategies. In this regard, different oily wastes are treated in four main OSRW management strategies as four combinations of oily liquid waste treatment methods (centrifugation and chemical demulsification) and oily solid waste treatment methods (landfilling and incineration). To assess the impact of oily waste composition, 48 scenarios are generated using the full factorial design that can comprehensively represent the composition variations reported in the literature. Results obtained from the LCA method are used in MCDA to rank and select the most environmentally favorable scenario. The LCA results are further used to generate a decision matrix in conjunction with LCCA results. The matrix is divided into color zones that serve as a visual tool to make informative and timely decisions. In addition, the results of LCA for four selected environmental impacts (climate change, marine eutrophication, human toxicity, and marine eco-toxicity) are used to generate regression models that can serve as another useful tool for preliminary assessment of impacts of different OSRW management strategies. The results of this research demonstrate the applicability of the developed framework in assisting in informed decision-making for low-impact OSRW management.

Text

2021-06-11

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/78600

Civil Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/