Sustainability assessment framework for the prioritization of urban sewage treatment technologies

Urban sewage treatment is an irreplaceable part of environment protection and public health. In order to help the stakeholders choose the best scenario for urban sewage treatment, alternative technologies are proposed to wastewater treatment in cities by developing a novel sustainability decision support framework. The proposed methodology is used to study the illustrative case which includes four urban sewage treatment technologies. The results show that the anaerobic–oxidation ditch technology performs highest for sustainability for urban sewage treatment, following by anaeroxic–anoxic–oxic, sequencing batch reactor, and triple oxidation ditch in the descending order. The proposed method can be extended and applied to help stakeholders to decide the most sustainable wastewater treatment technology alternatives.