Energy and environmental risk assessments of poultry manure sustainable solution: An industrial case study in Singapore

Abstract

Despite the potential of poultry manure as a sustainable waste stream, poultry manure is unsatisfactorily utilized due to the lack of public confidence in both food safety and environmental concerns. In this paper, the energy, environmental and microbial risk assessments of an industrial-scale chicken manure gasification plant in Singapore are demonstrated to overcome the barriers of poultry manure utilization and standardize the management practice. The gasification products and performances are analyzed and optimized based on a numerical chemical reaction kinetics model. The life-cycle assessment results show that the gasification-based treatment has less greenhouse gas emissions than direct land application and anaerobic digestion approaches. Finally, the quantitative microbial risk assessment shows that all the potential pathogenic hazards in chicken manure can be removed through the gasification process, which proves the safety of chicken manure biochar for further agricultural applications and shows the potential infection risk of direct land application.