A comprehensive study of biological phosphorus removal systems from economic and environmental perspectives based on the optimization approach

Different biological phosphorus removal systems (BPRSs) are evaluated from economic and environmental perspectives by employing the Taguchi optimization approach for the first time. The BPRSs were simulated and compared in terms of total phosphorus removal efficiency (TP RE) using GPS-X software. Step Bio-P, the most efficient system, was selected for the subsequent environmental and cost analysis. At the optimum condition, the Step Bio-P with a 96.98% TP RE stood at the first rank, followed by the Johannesburg (83.17%)> University of Cape Town (UCT) (79.63%)> anaerobic/anoxic/oxic (A2O) (79.31%)> anoxic/oxic (AO) (78.89%)> Bardenpho (70.48%). Marine and freshwater ecotoxicity (59.57%) and freshwater eutrophication (11.84%) received the highest envi-ronmental impacts. Construction (77.66%) and amortization (7.3%) caused the maximum cost contributions. The sensitivity analysis revealed that chemical oxygen demand (COD) (17.48%) and TP (9.98%) imposed the maximum effects on the environmental categories. These results can be used as a guideline for wastewater reclamation. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).