Abstract:Mechanical depackagers separate valuable organics from residual food packaging, creating new opportunities to recover energy (i.e., biogas) and nutrients (i.e., digestate) via anaerobic digestion (AD). However, the possibility of imperfect separation has raised concerns that digestate derived from depackaged food waste may contain microplastics (plastic particles <5 mm). To better understand this tradeoff, we evaluated biochemical methane potential (BMP) and other key AD parameters as well as plastic (0.5−1, 1… Show more
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