Recovery of agricultural and food waste for compost production and agricultural reuse

Agricultural and food waste from farms and agro-food industries could be reused in order to improve food production systems. In fact, organic waste produced by the agricultural sector is rich in nutrients that can be recovered and used as fertilizers. Among the various organic wastes for nutrient recovery, the primary interest is towards livestock effluents both for the abundance of annual production and for the physical and chemical characteristics that make them suitable for the agricultural reuse. The process currently used for the treatment of organic waste is the AD process (anaerobic digestion), which converts organic waste into biogas (source of alternative energy) and digestate; biogas can be used as a while the digestate (soil fertilizer after composting). The objective of this work was to analyse three different livestock manure mixtures for biogas production by means of a laboratory-scale demonstration prototype of a plant for the anaerobic digestion of agro-food biomass, as well as to reuse the residual by-product of anaerobic digestion (AD effluent) for the preparation of compost on a laboratory-scale.