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Título
Carbon efficiency analysis in the provision of drinking water: Estimation of optimal greenhouse gas emissions
Año del Documento
2023
Editorial
Elsevier
Descripción
Producción Científica
Documento Fuente
Journal of Cleaner Production, 2023, vol. 392, p. 136304.
Abstract
Assessing carbon efficiency (CE) in the provision of drinking water services is essential to achieve a net-zero
greenhouse gas (GHG) urban water cycle. Previous studies evaluating the CE of water companies are very
scarce and employed parametric and non-parametric. Both methodological approaches present limitations such
as overfitting issues or require assumptions about the production technology which could lead to less reliable
efficiency scores. To overcome these limitations, in this study, and for the first time, we estimated CE of English
and Welsh water companies using the Efficiency Analysis Trees (EAT) approach. This technique brings together
machine learning and non-linear programming techniques to estimate production frontier and efficiency scores.
It also allowed us to quantify the optimal level of GHG emissions in the provision of water services and estimate
potential GHG savings. Bootstrap truncated regression methods were employed to quantify the impact of
operating characteristics on CE of water companies. The optimal level of GHG emissions was estimated to be
between 0.062 and 133.03 tons of CO2 equivalent (CO2eq) per year and per connected property. The average CE
was at the level of 0.632. This means that GHG emissions could reduce by 36.8% to maintain the same level of
water services. Equivalently, this corresponds to a reduction of 488,321 tons of CO2eq per year. Water only
companies exhibited a better performance than water and sewerage companies with an average CE of 0.785 and
0.540, respectively. The performance of the English and Welsh water companies decreased over time. In 2011 the
average CE was 0.772 whereas it went down to 0.534 in 2020. It was also estimated that on average water
companies could reduce 0.034 tons of CO2eq per cubic meter of drinking water supplied and 16.16 tons of CO2eq/
connected property per year. The regression results showed that topography and water treatment complexity had
a significant impact on CE. The conclusions of this study are relevant for policy makers to define policies toward
a low-carbon urban water cycle.
Materias Unesco
3308 Ingeniería y Tecnología del Medio Ambiente
Palabras Clave
Carbon
Water services
Efficiency analysis trees (EAT)
Environmental variables
Greenhouse gas emissions
ISSN
0959-6526
Revisión por pares
SI
Version del Editor
Propietario de los Derechos
© 2023 The Author(s)
Idioma
eng
Tipo de versión
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Derechos
openAccess
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