ABSTRACT
A recent review in Nature described desalination as a water treatment technology that is often “chemically, energetically and operationally intensive, focused on large systems”, and thus requires “considerable infusion of capital, engineering expertise and infrastructure”. The costs as well as the environmental concerns are still an impediment to the widespread use of desalination technologies today [285]. This indicates that desalination is a resource-intensive industrial process with significant environmental impacts. At the same time, some SWRO projects in California and Australia made headlines claiming that desalination is a “green” technology and that project developers are working towards “sustainability” [61, 68, 69, 264]. The seemingly contradictory statements are indicative of the current debate on the extent in which desalination plants will actually affect the environment. As desalination capacities and in particular SWRO capacities are expected to grow rapidly in the future, a critical examination and appraisal of the resource consumption and environmental impacts of desalination technologies was carried out in this thesis, followed by the identification and development of measures to increase the sustainability of desalination projects if necessary.
