Spatial Succession for Degradation of So

A huge amount of organic waste is generated annually around the globe. The main sources of solid and liquid organic waste are municipalities and canning and food industries. Most of it is disposed of in an environmentally unfriendly way since none of the modern recycling technologies can cope with such immense volumes of waste. Microbiological and biotechnological approaches are extremely promising for solving this environmental problem. Moreover, organic waste can serve as the substrate to obtain alternative energy, such as biohydrogen (H₂) and biometane (CH₄). This work aimed to design and test new technology for the degradation of food waste, coupled with biohydrogen and biometane production, as well as liquid organic leachate purification. The effective treatment of waste was achieved due to the application of the specific granular microbial preparation. Microbiological and physicochemical methods were used to measure the fermentation parameters. As a result, a four-module direct flow installation efficiently couples spatial succession of anaerobic and aerobic bacteria with other micro- and macromicroorganisms to simultaneously recycle organic waste, remediate the resulting leachate, and generate biogas.