A sustainability assessment of applicable treatment technologies using multi-criteria decision making analysis on wastewater treatment plant of City of Rafah

Wastewater reuse is a necessity especially in arid and semiarid regions. Assessing wastewater secondary treatment technologies with regard to sustainable development issues is a multi-criteria decision making problem that involves a number of conflicting objectives and various types of uncertainties. In this study, the Evidential Reasoning (ER) approach, which is a multi-criteria decision making method for dealing with problems having both quantitative and qualitative criteria under uncertainties, is used for prioritizing the wastewater secondary treatment technologies. The proposed ER approach for sustainability assessment of wastewater secondary treatment technologies consists of five main steps: 1. Identification of potential wastewater secondary treatment alternatives; 2. Determining contributing criteria in the assessment (with regard to economic, environmental, technological, and sociological/cultural aspects of wastewater reuse) and identifying the relative weights of the criteria using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP); 3. ER distributed modeling framework for the identified wastewater secondary treatment technology criteria. 4.Recursive ER algorithm for aggregating multiple identified wastewater secondary treatment technology criteria. 5. Utility interval based ER ranking method, which is designed to compare and rank the alternatives. The proposed approach has been applied to a wastewater treatment plant located at City of Rafah, Palestine. This study shows that: 1) ER approach provides a flexible and systematic method for sustainability assessment of wastewater treatment technology alternatives. 2) Phytoremediation technology, in this specific study, is the most sustainable secondary treatment alternative for wastewater reuse in agriculture.