Abstract
In Japan, most combustible wastes are incinerated. Due to the need to reduce fossil fuel consumption used for incineration and the necessity to utilize kitchen waste as biomass, there is a growing demand for technology to separate kitchen waste from combustible waste and to utilize it as an energy source. In this research, a Mechanical-Biological Treatment (MBT) system, which is a technology combining mechanical sorting and methane fermentation, was developed and sorting and fermentation tests were conducted using municipal waste. The results showed that it is possible to separate kitchen waste as fermentable material from combustible waste with high accuracy by means of shredding and screening, and that 150Nm3 of biogas per ton of fermentable material can be stably produced by mesophilic methane fermentation of the recovered fermentable material. In addition, the lower calorific value of combustible material after separating kitchen waste improved by 1.7times compared to before separation, indicating that this is effective as a high-efficiency incineration and fuelization technology.
