Livestock and Poultry Environmental Learning Center:

Home Page
Newsletter
Topics
Webcasts
More...

All articles about:

Research Summaries

Manure Treatment

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to obtain anaerobic digester blended feedstocks that contain all necessary constituents for optimized microbial activity, and consequently biogas production. For example, a waste material from a food processor or corn ethanol production facility may have a very high chemical oxygen demand (COD) but lack nutrients and buffering capacity. Blending such a waste with manure, that has a high level of nitrogen, phosphorus, and alkalinity, may result in an optimized feed stock.

Current Activity

A comprehensive examination of the advantages of blending wastes is complete. Included is a procedure to determine the optimal combination of waste material and the resulting energy potential. A new research project to be initiated in July 2008, examines the treatment of manure and food processor’s wastewater in a centralized digester. Specifically, two tools are being developed. One that uses GIS to indicate high concentrations of biomass wastes in Michigan that may be digestible.

The second is an easy to use modeling approach to determine costs and benefits for the specific sites that a food processor may identify. A proposal is pending with the Michigan Department of Agriculture on the possible byproducts resulting from anaerobically digesting blended manure and highly processed food commodity wastes. The objective of this proposed research is to develop a protocol to examine the potential of typical amendments used in fruit and vegetable food processing to synthesize problem compounds when mixed with manure and anaerobically digested.

What We Have Learned

Feedstock blending offers great advantages in optimizing biogas potential. The result is more profit potential from anaerobic digestion. In one case, the addition of 1.5% by volume of a waste syrup from an ethanol facility to dairy manure resulted in an increase in biogas volume by 40%.

Why is This Important

From a strategic operational perspective, blending waste streams to produce an optimized feed stock improves the efficiency and effectiveness of anaerobic digestion as an environmental protectant and waste to resource technology. There is also much experience throughout the world on centralized digesters that blend community and industrial waste streams.

For More Information

Steve Safferman
Michigan State University
Biosystems Engineering
202 Farrall Hall
East Lansing, MI 48824

Liu, Y., Miller, S.A., Safferman, S.I., Alternative treatments of Food and Manure for Biogas Production. Biofuels, Bioproducts & Biorefining, Submitted May 5, 2008.

Higginbotham, A., Saffron C.M, Safferman, S.I., Miller, S.A. Categorization of Chemical Additives to Food Processor Wastewater by, located on the Alternative for Food Processor’s Wastewater, Deliverables, Categorization.

This report was prepared for the 2008 annual meeting of the regional research committee, S-1032 "Animal Manure and Waste Utilization, Treatment and Nuisance Avoidance for a Sustainable Agriculture". This report is not peer-reviewed and the author has sole responsibility for the content.