A VIKOR-based approach to evaluate river contamination risks caused by wastewater treatment plant discharges

Pierre Guy Atangana Njock; Shui-Long Shen; Annan Zhou; Song-Shun Lin

doi:10.1016/j.watres.2022.119288

A VIKOR-based approach to evaluate river contamination risks caused by wastewater treatment plant discharges

Water Res. 2022 Nov 1:226:119288. doi: 10.1016/j.watres.2022.119288. Epub 2022 Oct 22.

Authors

Pierre Guy Atangana Njock¹, Shui-Long Shen², Annan Zhou³, Song-Shun Lin⁴

Affiliations

¹ MOE Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing Technology, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering, Shantou University, Guangdong 515063, China.
² MOE Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing Technology, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering, Shantou University, Guangdong 515063, China. Electronic address: shensl@stu.edu.cn.
³ Discipline of Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, School of Engineering, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Victoria 3001, Australia.
⁴ Department of Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.

PMID: 36323212
DOI: 10.1016/j.watres.2022.119288

Abstract

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) rarely eliminate emerging contaminants from effluents they discharged into waterways, and therefore, represent significant contaminations sources with deleterious environmental risks. This paper presents a VIKOR-based model to assess the contamination risk posed by a cluster of WWTPs. A risk index was defined via building a membership function embodying the performance degrees of WWTPs and risks levels within the framework of fuzzy set theory. The proposed approach was tested using a case study of WWTPs cluster along the Pearl River. Sensitivity analyses were carried out to investigate the robustness of the model. The results confirmed the ability of the proposed approach to reveal the risk level of a given treatment point. Further, the comparison with a TOPSIS scheme as well as sensitivity analysis results substantiate the consistency, accuracy, and reliability of the proposed approach. It is therefore bounds to improve the decentralized management of WWTPs-induced river contamination.

Keywords: Contamination risk; Risk assessment; River pollution; Wastewater discharge; Wastewater treatment plants.

MeSH terms

Environmental Monitoring
Reproducibility of Results
Rivers
Wastewater / analysis
Water Pollutants, Chemical* / analysis
Water Purification*

Substances

Waste Water
Water Pollutants, Chemical