By:  Arianna Irons, Kerjahni Prevost, Shacola Small

​

​

Abstract:

Anaerobic digestion is an integral part of many environmental engineering processes, such as wastewater treatment, and food and agricultural waste management. Engineers design these systems to recycle and minimize the impacts of waste on our environment, as well as produce useful products such as heat, energy and nutrient fertilizers. The investigation centers around how to effectively and efficiently break down food (HOT DOGS)  waste from the school cafeteria under different conditions; diced and whole to speed up food recycling. The research was carried out using plastic soda bottles for mini-anaerobic digesters and plastic containers as gas measurement devices, a total of three digesters were made for the investigation diced, whole and blank. A total of six hot dogs were used three finely dice and 3 whole for their respective digester and 500 ml of excrement from the goat digestive system was added to all three digesters as an inoculator to provide the necessary microbes to start the decomposition process. The methane gas production from the decomposing hot dogs diced vs. whole and blank was recorded and analyzed and concluded that the diced hot dogs produced more methane gas compared to the other units because the finer the hot dogs are chopped the greater the surface area provided for the microbes to work and the faster the decomposition and fermentation process. Anaerobic digestion can be used to biorecycle waste (poop and yard waste) into valuable resources such as energy, nutrients and biogas.