Reviewing the anaerobic digestion of food waste for biogas production

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 revi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRenewable & sustainable energy reviews Vol. 38; pp. 383 - 392
Main Authors Zhang, Cunsheng, Su, Haijia, Baeyens, Jan, Tan, Tianwei
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.10.2014
Elsevier
Subjects
Anaerobic digestion
Applied sciences
Biogas
Biomass
Co-digestion
Energy
Exact sciences and technology
Food waste
Natural energy
Pretreatment
Food waste
Biogas
Pretreatment
Anaerobic digestion
Co-digestion
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1364-0321
1879-0690
DOI:10.1016/j.rser.2014.05.038