The Milazzo peninsula, North-Eastern Sicily, Italy, is the implantation site of potentially polluting anthropogenic activities. Among them, a refinery and a thermoelectric plant. An epidemiological study has shown a decrease of human health quality in the area, but there was no further research as to the reasons of this observation. The aim of this work is to better understand how the Milazzo peninsula's anthropogenic emissions impact the local human health and ecosystems. The Life Cycle Assessment calculating approach was chosen in order to study the consequences of the emissions resulting from the following local anthropogenic activities: the thermoelectric plant, the refinery, the road traffic, the illegal combustion of domestic waste. The Impact 2002+ and the ReCiPe 2008 global-scale models were chosen, as well as a site-specific approach. In order to conduct this site-specific calculation, Milazzo soils and seawater samples were gathered and the specific local parameters were deduced from their analyses. The global-scale results pointed out the waste combustion emissions and the thermoelectric plant as the main causes of the human health quality decrease, while the thermoelectric plant was pointed out as the anthropogenic activity causing the most environmental damages. The site-specific study applied to the soil and seawater ecotoxicity confirmed the important role of the thermoelectric plant's emissions in the damages upon the environment, especially the seawater. Moreover, the site-specific study also corrected the soil ecotoxic impact scores, showing the importance of both thermoelectric plant and illegal waste combustion contributions to the damaging of the environment. As a conclusion, LCA study as a whole enlightens and explains the previous observations of human health and ecosystem damages in the site of study while the site-specific study proved relevant in the peculiar area of Milazzo.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:CCSD/oai:tel.archives-ouvertes.fr:tel-01018983 |
| Date | 23 April 2013 |
| Creators | Mey, Morgane |
| Publisher | Université de Strasbourg |
| Source Sets | CCSD theses-EN-ligne, France |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | PhD thesis |
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