Life cycle assessment of desalination technologies integrated with renewable energies Original Research Article

This paper deals with a global environmental analysis of the integration of renewable energy—wind energy, photovoltaic energy and hydro-power—with different desalination technologies—Multi-Stage Flash, Multi-Effect Distillation and Reverse Osmosis. This paper continues the way of a research work, whose main aim consists on performing the environmental assessment, by means of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique, of different desalination technologies in order to establish with a broad perspective and in a rigorous and objective way the technology provoking lower environmental load. The software SimaPro 6.0, developed by Dutch PRé Consultants, has been used as the LCA analysis tool, and three different evaluation methods—CML 2 baseline 2000, Eco-Points 97 and Eco-Indicator 99—have been applied.