Research on Vegetable Waste Aeration Oxygen-Supply Compost and its Ammonia Volatilization

Abstract

Normally, because the water content is generally high in vegetable waste, the quality of aerobic composting can not be guaranteed. In order to solve this problem, this experiment, regarding lettuce waste and pumpkin straw as researching objects, by adding corn straw as auxiliary materials, chicken manure and cattle dung as regulators, conducts research on the process of aerobic fermentation and the ammonia volatilization in this process. The experiment sets up six treatments in total, they are respectively: A1 (lettuce + corn straw), A2 (lettuce + corn straw + chicken manure), A3 (lettuce + corn straw + cattle dung), B1 (pumpkin straw + corn straw), B2 (pumpkin straw + corn straw + chicken manure) and B3 (pumpkin straw + corn straw + cattle dung). After all treatments being mixed, the aerobic compost is conducted through aeration oxygen-supply and the physicochemical properties and material changes in the composting process have been monitored. The results show that: adding cattle dung has a greater impact on the process of vegetable waste composting than adding chicken manure, where, the germination indexes (GI) A3 and B3 adding cattle dung are respectively 7.10% and 3.44% higher than those of A2 and B2 in adding chicken manure; after the composting the C/N of all treatments are lower than their initial values and reach a significant level (P<0.0001), among them, C/Ns of A3 and B3 decrease to the greatest extent, which are 52.84% and 53% respectively; in the whole composting process, the quantity of ammonia volatilization in treatments adding chicken manure (A2 and B2) is significantly higher than that of adding cattle dung (A3 and B3). On the whole, adding cattle dung can better promote the decomposing process in vegetable waste composting and reduce nitrogen loss than adding chicken manure under conditions in this experiment.