Socioecology Research Today

Primary energy savings potential is used to compare five residual municipal solid waste treatment systems, including configurations with mechanical (MT) and mechanical–biological (MBT) pre-treatment, which produce waste-derived fuels (RDF and SRF), biogas and/or recover additional materials for recycling, alongside a system based on conventional mass burn waste-to-energy and ash treatment. To examine the magnitude of [...]

Dog mess: to most of the population, it is a bio-hazard about as welcome and useful as syphilis. Even those required to collect it approach it with a plastic bag and a grimace. But for one former banker, it is the key to a tantalising civic and eco-energy revolution.After three years of development work, Britain’s [...]

The majority of population growth in developing countries will occur in small cities closely linked to agricultural zones, with poor access to water and sanitation. Wastewater management priorities in these regions will be different from those in larger cities and developed countries. Two wastewater treatment systems in Bolivia, one with an upflow anaerobic sludge blanket [...]

This paper investigates the effect of recycling on biomass energy yield in High Rate Algal Ponds (HRAPs). Two 8 m3 pilot-scale HRAPs treating primary settled sewage were operated in parallel and monitored over a 2-year period. Volatile suspended solids were measured from both HRAPs and their gravity settlers to determine biomass productivity and harvest efficiency. [...]

Butanol production by Clostridium acetobutylicum DSM 792 fermentation was investigated. Unsupplemented cheese whey was adopted as renewable feedstock. The conversion was successfully carried out in a biofilm packed bed reactor (PBR) for more than three months.The PBR was a 4 cm ID, 16 cm high glass tube with a 8 cm bed of 3 mm [...]

The concept of waste-to-energy (WtE) with regards to the utilization of byproducts from the bioethanol industry (e.g., distiller’s dried grain with solubles: DDGS) was employed to enhance the renewability of biodiesel, which would be an initiative stage of a biorefinery due to the conjunction between bioethanol and biodiesel. For example, DDGS is a strong candidate [...]

Several nickel-based catalysts (Ni/Al2O3, Ni/MgO, Ni/CeO2, Ni/ZSM-5, Ni-Al, Ni-Mg-Al and Ni/CeO2/Al2O3) have been prepared and investigated for their suitability for the production of hydrogen from the two-stage pyrolysis–gasification of polypropylene. Experiments were conducted at a pyrolysis temperature of 500 °C and gasification temperature was kept constant at 800 °C with a catalyst/polypropylene ratio of 0.5. [...]

Electricity production from filter sterilized cheese whey at different organic loads (0.35, 0.7, 1.5, 2.7 and 6.7 g COD/L respectively) was investigated in a two-chamber microbial fuel cell (MFC). The best performance of the cell was observed at the highest concentration of the pretreated (filter sterilized) cheese whey (6.7 g COD/L) corresponding to a maximum [...]

Waste incineration bottom ash fine fraction contains a significant amount of aluminium, but previous works have shown that current recovery options based on standard on-step Eddy Current Separation (ECS) have limited efficiency. In this paper, we evaluated the improvement in the efficiency of ECS by using an additional step of crushing and sieving. The efficiency [...]

This study is the first hydrothermal liquefaction paper of wastewater-derived microalgae. The municipal wastewater matrix and resultant mixed-culture biomass significantly influenced liquefaction product distribution, yielding a higher proportion of biochar, which may be a valuable co-product. This paper explores the potential for wastewater-fed algal systems integrated with hydrothermal liquefaction, which together overcome challenges identified by [...]