Environmental performance analysis of urban drainage systems using life cycle assessment
Urban drainage systems, Compensatory measures, bioretention, LCA applied to urban drainage
The indiscriminate use of natural resources and the environmental impacts resulting from this process has led society to put pressure on the productive sectors to rethink their predominant practices and look for more sustainable methodologies. The emission of greenhouse gases, which is a direct result of anthropogenic action on the environment, has led to climate change, which impacts the entire planet. These climatic disturbances cause major changes in the hydrological cycle, leading to more and more intense rainfall. Cities, with their disorderly urban growth and increase in impermeable areas, need an efficient and integrated drainage system, in which compensatory measures are capable of reducing the hydraulic load on the existing drainage network. As a compensatory measure, the application of the bioretention system has shown good results, since it remanages rainwater in such a way as to obtain a hydrological behavior similar to the natural one. Therefore, this work seeks to analyze the bioretention system implemented at the Technology Center of the Federal University of Alagoas, applying the Life Cycle Assessment methodology, in order to find configurations in the system that present more satisfactory results from an environmental point of view.