Reclaimed Water
Wastewater that has been treated to a quality suitable for a specified reuse, such as agricultural irrigation or urban non-potable uses. The treatment needed -- and so the environmental and…
Glossary Terms
Working definitions for the terms that recur across this project: the circular economy, water resource recovery and reuse, and the life cycle methods -- LCA, LCC and S-LCA -- that AWARE combines into one sustainability assessment. They are written for a general reader rather than for specialists.
Showing entries beginning with R.
R
Reference Flow
The amount of product or service needed to deliver one functional unit. If the functional unit is 1 m³ of reclaimed water for irrigation, the reference flow of a plant…
Reference Scale
An S-LCA technique for turning qualitative social information into scores. Each indicator is rated on an ordinal scale -- typically from well below to well above an expected level of…
Resource Use
Impact categories for the depletion of non-renewable resources: fossil fuels, expressed as energy content, and minerals and metals, expressed relative to a reference element. Water is usually treated in its…
Reverse Osmosis (RO)
A membrane process that forces water through a semi-permeable membrane under high pressure, removing dissolved salts and most other contaminants. It produces very pure water for industrial reuse, at the…
Definitions are written for this site in plain language. The selection of terms was checked against the Life Cycle Initiative terminology (UNEP), the ILCA Common Glossary and the SimaPro LCA glossary, and against ISO 14040/14044, ISO 14046, ISO 14075 and the UNEP Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment (2020).
