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Biogas production and microbial community change during the Co-digestion of food waste with chinese silver grass in a single-stage anaerobic reactor

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Abstract

Chinese silver grass (CSG), a potential subtropical energy crop, was investigated as a co-substrate to enhance the anaerobic digestion of food waste for municipal solid waste treatment. Results showed that 88.1% of food wastes were degraded using CSG as a co-substrate with 45 days of digestion, where the food waste, CSG, and sludge on VS/TS/working volume was 93.14 g/111.55 g/1 L, in which the average biogas production was at 429.3 L/kg solids, and the average methane content was around 60%. During the digestion, the concentrations of ammonium and free ammonia gradually increased to 1448.2 and 265.2 mg/L respectively, without any significant inhibitory effects on biogas production, which is probably due to the buffering effects of CSG. Microbial community analysis showed that microorganisms from the class of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes were dominant during digestion, and that the microbial community diversity increased with active methanogenesis, suggesting that the addition of substrates contribute to the increase of microbial diversity, and could be beneficial for biogas production. Therefore, using CSG as a co-substrate in the single-stage food waste anaerobic digestion system is a potential simple method to convert CSG into renewable energy and to simultaneously improve food waste treatment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen, 361-021, China

    Shungang Wan, Jian Sun & Wensui Luo

  2. School of Environment, Guangxi University, Nanning, 530-004, China

    Lei Sun

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100-049, China

    Jian Sun

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Correspondence to Wensui Luo.

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Wan, S., Sun, L., Sun, J. et al. Biogas production and microbial community change during the Co-digestion of food waste with chinese silver grass in a single-stage anaerobic reactor. Biotechnol Bioproc E 18, 1022–1030 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12257-013-0128-4

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