Abstract
Due to its ability to recover both material and energy from organic waste, biogas technology is considered one of the best technology for treating organic waste. While in many emerging Asian countries more than 50% of municipal waste is organic waste, the amount of organic waste treated with biogas technology remains very limited. This study identified key challenges faced by practitioners in sustaining biogas plants from literature and interviewed a number of sustainably operating biogas plant managers and, based on the findings, developed an implementation framework to help decision makers and practitioners in planning a sustainable municipal organic waste biogas plant facility.
Highlights
Biogas or the anaerobic digestion (AD) technology is one of the oldest forms of renewable energy (RE) [1]
Previous studies on the implementation of AD technology have focused on topics such as technical issues [21,22], the national scope [14,23,24,25], the European region [26,27,28], and cross-sectional reviews of the sustainability of renewable energy practices in developing countries [19]
Our study focused on organic waste biogas plant implementation and summarized approaches based on three challenge categories—technical, financial, and social—supporting the construction of a sustainability framework relevant to the developing Asian region
Summary
Biogas or the anaerobic digestion (AD) technology is one of the oldest forms of renewable energy (RE) [1]. This study focuses on the emerging (lower-middle and upper-middle) Asian region because there is potential to use biogas plant technology to increase energy supplies generated from organic municipal waste and to respond to mounting waste management challenges emerging from the region’s population growth. Some studies have covered technical issues [21,22] and issues of the domestic scale [14,23,24,25], while others have presented regional reviews for the European region [26,27,28] and cross-sectional reviews of the sustainability of renewable energy practices adopted in developing countries [19]. Our study reviews the challenges faced by biogas plant practitioners and, based on this, develops a framework of factors required to sustain a municipal organic waste biogas plant in emerging Asia
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