Anaerobic Co-digestion of Cow Manure and Banana Waste as a Contribution to Local Energy Sustainability
摘要
Agricultural activities are an essential source of waste generation with a notable polluting effect on groundwater and surface water. In this sense, the need to mix excreta and other agricultural waste is established to increase the contribution to the circularity of processes at the local level. Farmers dealing with bovine cattle, hardly produce other food than the needed ones for animal feed. In this sense, one representative and very common crop in farms is the banana, being generated on harvesting, the so-called pseudo-stems. That is why this research aims to evaluate the methane potential of cow manure (CM) containing its lignocellulosic fraction with both refrigerated and fresh banana pseudo-stem (BPS), as a promoter of circular economy in farming activities at the local level. The experimental procedure was carried out according to a Simplex-Lattice mixture design. As a result, it was demonstrated that keeping BPS under refrigeration caused biological retarding and antagonist effect due to the oxidation process. Nevertheless, the methanogenic capacity (CME) was higher for the BPS monodigestion also due to the presence of sugars in its composition. On the contrary, the approach to the codigestion with fresh BPS expressed synergy instead. The process yielded 434.0 mLCH4/gVS for the combination of CM and fresh BPS when substrates were mixed on the ratio 0.5:0.5 w/w CM:BPS. Co-digestion of the assessed substrates doubled both, methane yield and CME demonstrated to be an important source of bioenergy for local development.