Anaerobic digestion (AD) could be considered as a mature technology and nowadays it can still play a pivot role because of the urgent need to provide renewable energy sources and efficiently manage the continuously growing amount of organic waste. Biochar (BC) is an extremely versatile material, which could be produced by carbonization of organic materials, including biomass and wastes, consistently with Circular Economy principles, and "tailor-made" for specific applications. The potential BC role as additive in the control of the many well-known critical issues of AD processes has been increasingly

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Wine lees have a great potential to obtain clean energy in the form of biogas through anaerobic digestion due to their high organic load. However, wine lees are a complex substrate and may likely give rise to instabilities leading to failure of the biological process. This work analysed the digestion of wine lees using two different approaches. First, electro-oxidation was applied as pre-treatment using boron-doped diamond-based electrodes. The voltage was 25 V and different treatment times were tested (ranging from 0.08 to 1.5 h) at 25 °C. Anaerobic digestion of wine lees was evaluated in batch tests to investigate the effect of electro-oxidation on biogas yield. Electro-oxidation exhibited a significant positive effect on biogas production increasing its value up to 330 L kg−1 of volatile solids after 1.5 h of treatment, compared to 180 L kg−1 of volatile solids measured from raw wine lees. As a second approach, the addition of biochar to the anaerobic digestion of wine lees was investigated; in the experimental conditions considered in the present study, the addition of biochar did not show any positive effect on anaerobic digestion performance.

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