Comparative environmental and economic life cycle assessment of high solids anaerobic co-digestion for biosolids and organic waste management

Alternative seagrass wrack management practices in the circular bioeconomy framework: A life cycle assessment approach

“…Comparable results were obtained also adopting the midpoint level of the impacts evaluation method (Figure 2); seagrass landfilling (S0_L) was confirmed to be the worst environmental alternative for 16 out of the 18 analysed impact categories, while the AD scenarios (S1_AD; S3_ER) always showed the best environmental performances. These results confirm (Slorach et al, 2019) and (Lee et al, 2020), who showed that AD is the most sustainable solution for organic waste treatment, while landfilling should always be avoided even when considering landfill gas recovery.…”

“…In the field of organic waste valorisation, several studies presented applications of the LCA methodology to alternative management systems such as AD or composting in order to compare the environmental performances of these valorisation scenarios to landfilling (Bernstad Saraiva Schott et al, 2016;Evangelisti et al, 2014;Slorach et al, 2019). In terms of substrates to be treated, most of the papers were focused on food waste (Lamnatou et al, 2019;Yu et al, 2020), garden waste (Lee et al, 2020) or organic residues of industrial processes (Batuecas et al, 2019;González et al, 2020;Timonen et al, 2019). To the best of our knowledge no papers were published applying LCA to alternative management systems alternative management systems for seagrasswrack.…”

Fate of disposable face masks in high-solids anaerobic digestion: Experimental observations and review of potential environmental implications

“…It should be noted that full-scale HSAD digesters are typically operated for a retention time of 28 days [ 17 , 18 ], while we continued this experiment for 40 days as face masks loaded digesters were producing more methane during the declining phase. After 28 days, the difference in the cumulative methane production between the control and test digesters were more prominent (157 vs. 104 and 126 ​L).…”

“…Moreover, HSAD systems require less heating cost due to low water content in feedstock and/or smaller digester footprints [ 15 ]. A majority of full-scale commercial HSAD systems are based on modular system design combining digester tanks for solids and percolate storage tanks [ [16] , [17] , [18] ]. The recirculation of percolate (also called leachate) between the digester and percolate storage tanks provides homogenization of organics and nutrients, which is critical because high-solids digester is typically operated without any active mixing [ 16 , 18 , 19 ].…”

“…A majority of full-scale commercial HSAD systems are based on modular system design combining digester tanks for solids and percolate storage tanks [ [16] , [17] , [18] ]. The recirculation of percolate (also called leachate) between the digester and percolate storage tanks provides homogenization of organics and nutrients, which is critical because high-solids digester is typically operated without any active mixing [ 16 , 18 , 19 ]. Due to high heterogeneity and solids content in OFMSW, HSAD is used instead of low-solids/wet-type anaerobic digestion [ 12 , 16 ].…”