Environmental and economic assessment of urban water services for a greenfield development

Increasing needs for new urban water infrastructure are very difficult to meet within existing environmental constraints. New ways must be found to deliver these services with lower water demand, greenhouse gas emissions, and discharge of nutrients. Alternative means of water servicing are being considered for long-term ecological sustainability. An environmental and economic assessment framework combined with various analysis tools like water balance, life-cycle costing, and life-cycle assessment (LCA) is presented in this paper to evaluate a range of alternative water servicing scenarios. LCA has the potential to evaluate development and associated service provision impacts on the environment in the long term, locally and globally. Application of this framework and analysis approaches was demonstrated on a 3062 hectare greenfield development for 86,000 residents near Melbourne.