The sustainability performance of the desalination processes has received increasing attention in recent years. In this study, the current progress and future perspective of a life cycle assessment (LCA) of desalination technology in 62 previous studies have been reviewed for the period 2004-2019. It was found that the number of LCA studies related to seawater reverse osmosis has gained popularity compared to other types of desalination technologies. The review emphasized the application of LCA to desalination by means of research objective, scope of study, life stages, and impact assessment. Although previous LCA studies were conducted to assess the environmental performance of the desalination technology, little attention was given to evaluating the impact of other sustainability aspects (i.e., economic and social). The latter part of this study discusses the challenges, feasibility, and recommendations for future LCA studies on desalination technology. The integration of the LCA approach with other approaches allows a comprehensive assessment of the sustainability performance of desalination technology. Thus, the combined approaches should be explored in future studies to gain insight into the sensitivity and uncertainty of the data to make an assessment that can be useful in policy-making.
This study aims to assess the environmental impacts of conventional and organic rice cultivations and proposes a sustainable conceptual framework of rice farming based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. A cradle-to-gate LCA was performed by using the ReCiPe 2016 method and SimaPro 8.5 software. The functional unit was one ton of rice grains harvested. Primary data were obtained from the farmer, while secondary data were collected from Ecoinvent 3.0, the Agri Footprint 3.0 database and the literature. The total characterization factors for global warming potential (GWP), water consumption potential (WCP) and fossil fuel depletion potential (FFP) were 457.89 kg CO2-eq, 98.18 m3 and 84.56 kg oil-eq, respectively, at the midpoint level for conventional rice, while the impacts for organic rice were 140.55 kg CO2-eq, 29.45 m3 and 22.25 kg oil-eq, respectively. At the endpoint level, the total characterization factors for human health damage (HH), ecosystem damage (ED) and resource availability (RA) for conventional rice were 9.63 × 10-4 DALY, 5.54 × 10-6 species.year and 30.98 Dollar, respectively, while for organic rice, the impacts were 2.60 × 10-4 DALY, 2.28 × 10-6 species.year and 8.44 Dollar, respectively. Rice cultivation impacted the environment, particularly in relation to three impact categories: GWP, WCP and FFP. The cultivation phase of rice production was the main contributor to environmental impacts due to the production and application of fertilizer and pesticides. It can be concluded that the application of LCA in agricultural sector is able to provide information and responses for policy makers in understanding the potential environmental impacts at various spatial levels.