Biofuel production and utilization through smart and sustainable biowaste management

EU member states are facing many challenges in order to fulfil different legal obligations linked with the sustainable waste management. The EU legislation related to environmental protection, already implemented in the national legislation of the Republic of Croatia, aims to introduce a system of integrated and sustainable waste management. This puts a focus on material and energy utilization of different waste streams produced in urban areas. Therefore, this requirement represents main challenge for many municipalities, mostly due to various binding targets in waste collection and treatment. Some of them are: reduction of waste generation and disposal, increase of the separately collected waste amounts and recycling rates. Source-separation of biowaste combined with biofuel production is one of the key priorities for many cities, combined with biofuel production in urban areas and its distribution via existing gas grids. The objective of this research is to present environmental benefits of such concept for city of Zagreb. First step is involvement of citizens and assessment of available organic waste. Hence, the conducted analysis has been performed as a survey in order to understand their behaviour and to successfully assess the energy potential of organic fraction from municipal solid waste. The presented research show that 84% of citizens are willing and motivated to participate in biowaste separation. An estimation of energy potential through the anaerobic digestion of organic waste has been presented and calculated to 1,900 t of biomethane based on the analysis which can be utilized through almost 70 CNG busses. This paper proposed concrete solution for the biofuel consumption, and gave an overview of the required land demand for digestate utilization. Also, presented SWOT analysis is giving an overview and confirming the sustainability of proposed concept. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.