About one-third of all food goes to waste, ending up in landfills and compost heaps where it breaks down into methane, a potent greenhouse gas. An alternative disposal method is co-digestion of food waste in anaerobic digesters, such as those at municipal wastewater treatment facilities or in on-farm manure digesters. Thes co-digestion strategies have been shown to maximize biogas yields from both the newly introduced food waste streams and the existing digestate influents, though how complex microbial consortia interact synergistically to achieve this is still poorly understood. In this work, we designed a series of alternative waste co-digestion cultures using food industry waste with domestic wastewater or dairy cow manure digester sludges. We analyzed the effects of co-digestion on biogas quality and used high throughput sequencing techniques to analyze shifts in the microbial community composition. Our goal was to better understand the underlying microbiology that drives biogas production during food waste co-digestion.

Deeper understanding of co-digestion of domestic wastewater settled solids and food industry waste using molecular biological tools

2019 Spring National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.