Anaerobic digestion of food waste using artificially cultured and natural anaerobes under Mesophilic conditions

Municipal Solid waste management is becoming a critical problem in most of the megacities of the world. Anaerobic digestion is one of the technologies to convert that waste into useful form of energy. But countries like Singapore having limited resources, cannot fulfil the cow dung or other animal manure requirements in anaerobic digestion. Therefore in the present paper a comparative study has been presented for natural and artificial inocula used for anaerobic digestion of Singaporean food waste. Laboratory-scale batch type digesters were operated to study the effect of natural and artificial inoculums prepared from different animals. Effect of different parameters e.g. COD, PH, TS on digestion has been studies. Results showed that the artificial inocula are less effective as they are converting the COD into CO2. However, natural inocula have shown good results for digestion of food waste. CN ratio and PH value has also found to have significant effect on digestion process.