Fruit and vegetable waste from markets as a substrate for agricultural biogas plant

Abstract

Waste management is an important element of environmental protection in each country. Vegetable and fruit waste are produced in every place in the world, hence it is necessity to manage it. Legal regulations in Poland forbid the storage of this waste which were selectively collected. Therefore, it is necessary to looking for other methods of their management. Agricultural biogas plants are an important source of renewable energy. In last years, in Europe, the most important substrate used for biogas production was maize silage. Currently, biogas plant owners are looking for other substrates. Fruit and vegetable waste from market can be successfully processed into renewable energy. The aim of this study was to determine the biogas and methane efficiency and the fermentation process dynamic of waste from regional market in Poland. The experiment was carried under mesophilic anaerobic digestion conditions (39°C) in the 21-chamber biofermentor set at the Laboratory of Ecotechnology in the Institute of Biosystems Engineering on Poznan University of Life Sciences. The biogas efficiency for substrate amounted to 70.47 m3·Mg-1 in fresh matter. The calculation showed that to feed a 0.1 MWel biogas plant with waste from the market, is needed 17.3 Mg of substrate per day.