Enhanced Anaerobic Digestion of Organic Waste

Anaerobic digestion (AD) of organic municipal solid waste (OMSW) is considered as a key element in sustainable municipal waste management due to its benefits for energy, environment, and economy. This process reduces emission of greenhouse gases, generates renewable natural gas, and produces fertilizers and soil amendments. Due to its advantages over other treatment methods and waste-to-energy technologies, anaerobic digestion has attracted more attention so that numerous research works in this area are performed. In this chapter, an overview of previous studies on anaerobic digestion using OMSW as the feedstock is presented. First, the principals of anaerobic digestion including chemical and biological pathways and microorganisms responsible for different steps of the process are discussed. Factors influencing the efficiency of the process such as temperature, pH, moisture content, retention time, organic loading rate and C/N ratio are also presented in this chapter. Different methods of pretreatment applied to enhance biogas production from anaerobic digestion of municipal solid waste are also discussed.