Biowaste Management
A special issue of Energies (ISSN 1996-1073). This special issue belongs to the section "A4: Bio-Energy".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 May 2021) | Viewed by 46637
Special Issue Editor
Interests: agriculture; environmental technology; process management; techno economic assessment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
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Dear colleagues,
Just as every creature is doomed to perish and every molecule to crumble into atoms, each form of life is connected with the creation of biological waste. The complexity of the interactions between kingdoms of life is still beyond our full understanding.
The knowledge of handling biological waste is growing rapidly, with a major impact on the global economy. In a more narrow sense, biowaste is a type of waste containing a significant amount of microbially degradable organic matter, including, for instance, raw and digested sludge from wastewater treatment plants; organic waste from fruit and vegetable processing, dairies, yeast factories, or the meat-processing industry; as well as waste biomass from primary agricultural and forestry production.
In the past century, biowaste was perceived primarily as a possible source of energy; therefore, its processing was historically aimed above all at incineration. Occasionally, it was also used as input material in composting, where it functions as a source of energy for microorganisms. The main point of interest was especially the disposal of this waste.
Significant progress in biowaste processing was represented by anaerobic digestion, or more precisely, the anaerobic decomposition of organic matter in fermentors, releasing biogas with methane as the main constituent. At the end of the twentieth century there was a sharp increase in biogas stations which had undergone development from batch psychrophilic digestion to today’s continually working biogas stations with mesophilic and thermophilic operation. The resulting biogas is routinely incinerated in a gas engine with an alternator, with electricity and waste heat being most often considered as products. Recently, a series of discoveries have been made concerning how to utilize waste heat and fermentation residues more effectively.
The use of pyrolysis seems to be promising under current conditions. Basically, it is “dry distillation” during which solid, liquid, and gaseous pyrolytic products are produced, with each of the groups having commercially interesting use. It can be predicted that development will be heading towards biorefining methods with a high degree of heat recuperation.
Dr. Josef Maroušek
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- biodegradability
- food waste
- organic matter
- soil organic matter
- nutrient recovery
- biorefinery
- postharvest residues
- biogas
- hydrolysis
- pyrolysis
- nutrient bioavailability
- techno-economic assessment
- soil biota
- sustainability
- agriculture
- process management
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