Sustainable treatment of fluoride-containing groundwater for small food and beverage industries: A life-cycle assessment of technology options

: This study compares two practical fluoride-removal variants for a small food and beverage production facility using low-mineralized groundwater with slight fluoride exceedance: full-flow electrocoagulation (EC) and partial-flow nanofiltration (NF) followed by blending. Life cycle assessment was performed in SimaPro using ReCiPe 2016 Midpoint (H) and Endpoint (H), with 1 m 3 of final water meeting the fluoride limit as the functional unit. The analysis was first conducted for a basic gate-to-gate model ending at the generation of process-specific residual streams and was then extended to include downstream residual-stream management. In the basic model, both technologies showed comparable environmental performance. EC achieved a slightly lower endpoint single score than NF, 62.2 and 64.9 mPt/FU, respectively, corresponding to a 4.3% higher aggregated burden for NF. After inclusion of downstream residual-stream management, the difference increased, with endpoint scores of 60.6 mPt/FU for EC and 70.8 mPt/FU for NF. This was mainly associated with NF concentrate treatment and transport, as well as backwash wastewater treatment. Human health dominated the endpoint results in both modelling variants. Midpoint results confirmed that neither technology was preferable in all impact categories, although NF was more sensitive to residual-stream management assumptions. A simplified multi-criteria decision assessment slightly favoured EC, with total weighted scores of 4.05 for EC and 3.95 for NF. The results show that fluoride-removal technology selection should consider not only removal efficiency, but also treatment intensity, blending strategy, residual-stream management and site-specific operating conditions.