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Single-Stage and Two-Stage Anaerobic Digestion of Food Waste: Effect of the Organic Loading Rate on the Methane Production and Volatile Fatty Acids

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Abstract

The high organic content of food waste (FW), which represents the largest proportion of municipal solid waste (MSW) (in Latinamerican countries 50–75%), makes its treatment increasingly common trough technologies such as anaerobic digestion (AD), to obtain value-added by-products, such as renewable energy in the form of methane, digestates and other by-products of biotechnological applications such as long-chain fatty acids. In this study, the influence of semi-continuous reactors in single-stage (R1) and two-stage (R2: acidogenic and R3: methanogenic reactors) configurations on the AD-FW was evaluated (including parameters related to process monitoring, organic matter conversion and process reactions) with the following organic loading rate (OLR: kgVS m-3 d-1) values: i. R1: 0.7, 1.5, 3.0 and 6.0; ii. R2: 3.0, 4.0, 9.0 and 15.0; and R3: 1.0, 2.0, 4.0 and 7.0. The two-stage configuration showed a better performance in terms of: i. the OLRs: 35% higher than that in the single-stage configuration, with chemical oxygen demand (CODtotal) and volatile solid (VS) removal efficiencies > 80%; ii. the best performance in terms of methane production, with statistically significant differences (p<0.05) in the quantity and quality of biogas and iii. obtaining other by-products with high added value, such as behenic and caproic acid, which are useful in biotechnological applications. Additionally, it was found that total reducing sugars (TRS) are an important parameter in the monitoring and conversion of matter organic, mainly in two-stage configuration.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank COLCIENCIAS for supporting to Brayan A. Parra Orobio as a scholar of the National Doctorates Convocation Program (617 - 2013 –Second Cut) and the Universidad del Valle for funding the project “Evaluation of the anaerobic digestion of food waste under conditions of temperature lower than 20 °C for the production of renewable energy-CI 21118”.

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  1. Faculty of Engineering, Study and Control of Environmental Pollution – ECCA Research Group, Universidad del Valle, Calle 13, #100-00, Cali, Colombia

    Brayan Alexis Parra-Orobio & Patricia Torres-Lozada

  2. DataHow AG, c/o ETH Zürich, HCl, F137, Vladimir-Prelog-Weg 1, CH-8093, Zurich, Switzerland

    Mariano Nicolas Cruz-Bournazou

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  1. Brayan Alexis Parra-Orobio
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Parra-Orobio, B.A., Cruz-Bournazou, M.N. & Torres-Lozada, P. Single-Stage and Two-Stage Anaerobic Digestion of Food Waste: Effect of the Organic Loading Rate on the Methane Production and Volatile Fatty Acids. Water Air Soil Pollut 232, 105 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11270-021-05064-9

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