Vegetable and fruit market wastes as an appropriate source for biogas production via anaerobic digestion process

Urban waste management is a critical issue in today's world. On the other hand, energy supply is a significant need, especially from renewable sources. In this paper, an efficient method is studied for the production of biogas from vegetable and fruit market wastes. A comprehensive study is presented on the production of methane in biogas from vegetable and fruit market wastes. For this purpose, a reactor was designed and vegetable and fruit market wastes were used as feed of the reactor for biogas production. For supplying the moisture during the gas formation, the feed was mixed with distilled water in 1:1 ratio. The mean cell residence time was set at 25 days. The results showed an intense sensitivity of the microorganism to the pH of the reactor. In acidic media, the produced biogas was very lower than neutral and slightly basic media. In addition, the percentage of the methane in the biogas showed to be increased by increasing pH from 6.3 to 7.6.