Emerging perspectives on environmental burden minimisation initiatives from anaerobic digestion technologies for community scale biomass valorisation
Emerging perspectives on environmental burden minimisation initiatives from anaerobic digestion technologies for community scale biomass valorisation
This paper provides an extensive review of anaerobic digestion (AD) systems, with a specific focus on community scale digesters for urban applications, processing either municipal organic waste exclusively or as mix feed. Emphasis is placed on reducing the systems scale environmental impact of AD technologies, including pre- and post-treatment stages, alongside biogas production. Developments to-date in AD system research in Europe and in the Asia region have been compared, providing a comprehensive evaluation of current practice, elucidating the areas of further potentials.
The scope of this review is two-fold – one, covering AD technologies including a cohort of simple and integrated wet and dry systems, which can be operated as continuous flow designs in single- or multi-stages. Two, focusing more on practices in digestate handling that minimise environmental impacts arising from their storage and land application. From an environmental perspective, we note the following trends emerging in the literature for processing urban waste that need further exploitation: dry AD (60-85% moisture) is suitable for low organic loads, mainly owing to resource savings in terms of water usage; co-digestion has shown better buffering capability, especially for two-stage digestion of food-based feed stocks; separating the digestate into liquid/solid fractions is effective for handling post-digestion emissions, mainly for mitigating ammonia volatilisation to air and phosphate leaching to soil.
We report responses to a survey, conducted for this review, highlighting the contemporary issues and challenges - with particular focus on the operational, social and management issues from an Indian perspective. There is need for follow-up of running plants to ensure their environmental performance. Such initiatives will have to consider managing of pollution footprints from AD, alongside the current drive for its widespread implementation for two incentives: greenhouse gas mitigation and fossil-fuel independence.
ammonia, anaerobic digestion, digestate, environmental burden, life cycle assessment, valorisation
883-901
Tiwary, A.
f948aa5f-5c42-42b0-8bcb-d8ea5e0d58f8
Williams, I.D.
c9d674ac-ee69-4937-ab43-17e716266e22
Pant, D.C.
52aca8c6-28fe-45dc-9925-62b1171c4e2d
Kishore, V.V.N.
61251d8d-506a-485b-97db-4a2bab8ada61
February 2015
Tiwary, A.
f948aa5f-5c42-42b0-8bcb-d8ea5e0d58f8
Williams, I.D.
c9d674ac-ee69-4937-ab43-17e716266e22
Pant, D.C.
52aca8c6-28fe-45dc-9925-62b1171c4e2d
Kishore, V.V.N.
61251d8d-506a-485b-97db-4a2bab8ada61
Tiwary, A., Williams, I.D., Pant, D.C. and Kishore, V.V.N.
(2015)
Emerging perspectives on environmental burden minimisation initiatives from anaerobic digestion technologies for community scale biomass valorisation.
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 42, .
(doi:10.1016/j.rser.2014.10.052).
Abstract
This paper provides an extensive review of anaerobic digestion (AD) systems, with a specific focus on community scale digesters for urban applications, processing either municipal organic waste exclusively or as mix feed. Emphasis is placed on reducing the systems scale environmental impact of AD technologies, including pre- and post-treatment stages, alongside biogas production. Developments to-date in AD system research in Europe and in the Asia region have been compared, providing a comprehensive evaluation of current practice, elucidating the areas of further potentials.
The scope of this review is two-fold – one, covering AD technologies including a cohort of simple and integrated wet and dry systems, which can be operated as continuous flow designs in single- or multi-stages. Two, focusing more on practices in digestate handling that minimise environmental impacts arising from their storage and land application. From an environmental perspective, we note the following trends emerging in the literature for processing urban waste that need further exploitation: dry AD (60-85% moisture) is suitable for low organic loads, mainly owing to resource savings in terms of water usage; co-digestion has shown better buffering capability, especially for two-stage digestion of food-based feed stocks; separating the digestate into liquid/solid fractions is effective for handling post-digestion emissions, mainly for mitigating ammonia volatilisation to air and phosphate leaching to soil.
We report responses to a survey, conducted for this review, highlighting the contemporary issues and challenges - with particular focus on the operational, social and management issues from an Indian perspective. There is need for follow-up of running plants to ensure their environmental performance. Such initiatives will have to consider managing of pollution footprints from AD, alongside the current drive for its widespread implementation for two incentives: greenhouse gas mitigation and fossil-fuel independence.
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Tiwary et al 2014_RSERReviewPaper_PreProofVersion.pdf
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Published date: February 2015
Keywords:
ammonia, anaerobic digestion, digestate, environmental burden, life cycle assessment, valorisation
Organisations:
Centre for Environmental Science
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 371682
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/371682
ISSN: 1364-0321
PURE UUID: 2403e735-b986-43b0-9676-296d23ff5be9
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Date deposited: 12 Nov 2014 10:33
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:22
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Author:
A. Tiwary
Author:
D.C. Pant
Author:
V.V.N. Kishore
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