Operational performance of organic fraction of municipal solid waste discarded from communities, using an in-vessel hyperthermophilic composting technology

Abstract

There is a great need of in-situ Organic Fraction of Municipal Solid Waste (OFMSW) disposal inside community in most countries due to less transportation cost and secondary environmental while a shorter maturation period and less odor is required. In-vessel hyperthermophilic composting could probably address these issues. In this work, we reported the physicochemical parameters and corresponding microbial dynamics of a pilot-scale in-vessel Thermophilic Compost (HTC) and compared with Traditional Compost (TC). Results demonstrated that HTC effectively accelerated the maturation period of composting compared to TC, which shorten the whole compost cycle to 25 days. And the hyperthermophilic and thermophilic phases maintained more than one third of the whole period of HTC, which exhibiting superior or comparable key evaluation indexes than TC. Besides, the maximum N2O emission rate for TC is 10.2 times that of HTC. It was obviously due to extreme temperature as a result of inhibition of denitrifying bacteria for the HTC. Results of microbials analysis showed that during the thermophilic and hyperthermophilic period, mainly six strains of thermophilic bacteria including Bacillus (39.88%), Calditerricola (8.92%), Lactobacillus (8.76%), Oceanobacillus (5.4%), Planifilum (4.83%), and Ureibacillus (4.42%) were observed in HTC. It has been revealed that physico-chemical parameters can be regulated to optimize microbial composition for the purpose of enhancing hyperthermophilic composting, promoting organic matter degradation, and facilitating the recombination of middle-hyperthermophilic community OFMSW composting.