Reviewing the anaerobic digestion of food waste for biogas production

Cunsheng Zhang, Haijia Su, Jan Baeyens and Tianwei Tan

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2014, vol. 38, issue C, 383-392

Abstract: The uncontrolled discharge of large amounts of food waste (FW) causes severe environmental pollution in many countries. Within different possible treatment routes, anaerobic digestion (AD) of FW into biogas, is a proven and effective solution for FW treatment and valorization. The present paper reviews the characteristics of FW, the principles of AD, the process parameters, and two approaches (pretreatment and co-digestion) for enhancing AD of food waste. Among the successive digestion reactions, hydrolysis is considered to be the rate-limiting step. To enhance the performance of AD, several physical, thermo-chemical, biological or combined pretreatments are reviewed. Moreover, a promising way for improving the performance of AD is the co-digestion of FW with other organic substrates, as confirmed by numerous studies, where a higher buffer capacity and an optimum nutrient balance enhance the biogas/methane yields of the co-digestion system.

Keywords: Anaerobic digestion; Food waste; Biogas; Pretreatment; Co-digestion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (100)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2014.05.038

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