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Environmental impact assessment of digital water meters throughout urban

water cycle

Conference Paper · June 2024

DOI: 10.5194/egusphere-egu24-8882

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Mohsen Hajibabaei Martin Oberascher

University of Innsbruck University of Innsbruck
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Seyyed Ahmadreza Shahangian Florian Gschösser

University of Tehran University of Innsbruck
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EGU24-8882, updated on 05 Jun 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-8882
EGU General Assembly 2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Environmental impact assessment of digital water meters

throughout urban water cycle
Mohsen Hajibabaei1, Martin Oberascher1, Seyyed Ahmadreza Shahangian2, Florian Gschösser3,
and Robert Sitzenfrei1
1
Unit of Environmental Engineering, Department of Infrastructure Engineering, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
(Robert.Sitzenfrei@uibk.ac.at)
2
School of Civil Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
3
Unit of Project and Construction Management, Department of Structural Engineering and Material Sciences, University of
Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

Utilizing digital measurement devices enhances the efficiency and reliability of urban water
systems. For instance, digital water meters (DWMs) measure high-resolution water consumption at
customer sites, serving both personal awareness raising and advanced water loss management in
water distribution networks (WDNs). However, the pros and cons of these devices in terms of
environmental impacts have yet to be fully unrevealed. This research aims to bridge this gap by
conducting a comprehensive environmental assessment focused on the implementation of DWMs.
The assessment considers not only the direct environmental impact of DWMs (e.g., due to
production, installation, etc.) but also their indirect effects on the entire urban water cycle due to
their usage. As an example of an indirect effect, using DWMs can reduce household water demand
by promoting awareness. This leads to less freshwater treatment and pumping, decreased hot
water and energy consumption in households, and a lower volume of wastewater generation.
Thus, the current study categorizes the indirect effects on the urban water cycle into three scales:
freshwater scale (including freshwater treatment and pumping energy), water user scale (involving
energy consumption for water heating), and wastewater scale (including wastewater treatment).

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used as a holistic approach to quantify environmental impacts.
Accordingly, the system boundary is defined to encompass the entire life cycle of DWMs (from
production to end-of-life), as well as the three scales reflecting indirect effects. An Alpine city in
Austria with 105,000 inhabitants is selected as a case study, where the impacts of deploying DWMs
are evaluated by defining three scenarios according to the requirements of the study area. These
scenarios include: (1) Reducing 5% of total leakage, (2) Reducing 15% of water demand, and (3)
combining (1) and (2). For each scenario, comprehensive datasets on resources, processes, and
energy consumption are compiled, and impacts are quantified using the LCA software SimaPro
9.0.

Evaluating the environmental impacts of the study area in the existing situation (i.e., without any
DWMs) shows that the water user scale (including energy for water heating) contributes to 80% of
the total impacts. Thus, applying the second and third scenarios results in substantial energy
 savings across all scales (particularly water users) compared to the existing situation, reducing the
environmental impacts ranging from 3 to 4 million kilograms of CO2 equivalent per year. This
fluctuation is tied to the lifespan of the DWMs, extending from 2 to 8 years.

The proposed framework can explore the extent to which DWM deployment is sustainable,
providing a blueprint for decision-makers to assess the effectiveness of similar interventions in
different urban settings.

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