Occurrence of macroplastics and microplastics in biogenic waste digestate: Effects of depackaging at source and dewatering process

Abstract

Plastic debris, including macroplastics (>5 mm) and microplastics (0.1–5 mm), has proven to be an emerging contaminant. Anaerobic digestion, coupled with energy recovery, can be an effective valorization technology for biogenic waste. But the use of the resulting digestate as a soil conditioner is a source for plastic debris release into the environment. The preprocess and postprocess used could influence the quantity of plastic debris found in the digestate, but the specifics of these effects are relatively unknown. Therefore, we measured the quantity of plastic debris in raw digestate under a variety of preprocessing scenarios. We also investigated the occurrence of plastic debris in solid and liquid digestates resulting from the dewatering of raw digestate. The quantity of plastic debris ranged from 41 to 3298 particles/kg (WW) for raw digestate, 319–3604 particles/kg (WW) for solid digestate and 7–38 particles/kg (WW) for liquid digestate. We observed that depackaging at source by citizens themselves (removing the package of biogenic waste when dropping it into bins), significantly reduced the quantities of plastic debris in raw digestate by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, the number of polymer types in raw digestate, where depackaging occurred at source, were lower than that where this rule was not in place. The average size of plastic debris in solid digestate was significantly smaller than that in raw digestate, which indicated that the process of mechanical dewatering could generate MPs. It is recommended to depackage for biogenic waste at source to reduce the quantities of MPs in digestate.