Valorization of cheese whey wastewater to achieve sustainable development goals

Moses Tugume, Mona G. Ibrahim and Mahmoud Nasr

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2025, vol. 211, issue C

Abstract: While several studies have focused on managing cheese wastes for bioresource recovery in developing countries, assessing the techno-economic feasibility, carbon emissions, and sustainability performance of such systems is still to be determined. This research gap was addressed by designing a reliable cheese whey wastewater (CWW) management system that could recover biogas and biochar, followed by estimating the associated profits, net present values, and payback periods. Implementing this system to treat 1 m3 CWW with a chemical oxygen demand (COD) of 56.2 g/L could generate bio-CH4 (8.71 m3), biochar (1.21 kg), pyro-oil (1.99 kg), and syngas (0.31 kg) while self-consuming about half the energy produced. The revenues of carbon credit, COD shadow price, electricity, and biochar could maintain a 6.1-year payback period and a 10.15 % internal rate of return. The environmental benefits could recoup the annual expenses accompanied by biogas/biochar utilization in agricultural, energy, and field applications, demonstrating that the system's profitability criteria were less sensitive to variations in operational costs. Although the CO2-equivalent emissions represented significant environmental burdens, the green credit of biogenic CWW could endorse the life cycle assessment's mid-point and end-point categories. Ensuring clean water and affordable energy, recovering biochar as an enriched soil amendment, and enabling policies/finances by the proposed CWW valorization approach could fulfill sustainable development goals 6, 7, and 13 in low-income nations. Future studies are required to optimize the anaerobic digestion and pyrolysis operating parameters using machine learning techniques, reducing the running costs and improving the minimum selling prices of biofuel recovery from CWW.

Keywords: Biofuel revenue; Biogenic CO2; Cheese whey management; Digestate valorization; UN-SDG pillars (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032124009997
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:rensus:v:211:y:2025:i:c:s1364032124009997

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600126/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600126/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2024.115273

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews is currently edited by L. Kazmerski

More articles in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().