Speaker
Description
The increasing consumption of animal-based food, caused by a growing human population, resulted in the inevitable problem of higher waste generation, in particular faeces produced by the high number of animals bred. Although manure does not have a high commercial value in itself, it causes a high environmental impact by being one of the main contributors to emission of greenhouse gases in the agricultural sector and potentially threatening the safety of drinking water by leakage of nitrates and pathogens. Even though its use in the production of biogas by anaerobic digestion is one way to mitigate this environmental burden, this process is incomplete and wastes valuable resources. Biogas residues contain a significant amount of undigested lignocellulosic fibres and are therefore highly suitable as raw material for the extraction of cellulose, in particular nanocellulose (NFC). Due to elephant’s poor digestion capability and high biomass intake their manure was proposed as model system to study quantity and quality of NFC available from manure-biogas residues. Lignocellulosic fibres were isolated from biogas residues that were fermented for various digestion times and elephant manure directly, respectively. Resulting fibres were characterized with regards to their chemical and physical properties and NFC produced by defibrillation of those. To investigate the influence of anaerobic digestion, NFC papers from both reference and anaerobically pre-treated materials, respectively, were fabricated and their mechanical properties evaluated. NFC papers produced from agricultural waste streams required a lower number of grinding cycles to provide the same tensile strengths compared to NFC papers produced from high grade biomass, in addition to biogas having been produced prior to paper manufacturing. This demonstrates that agricultural waste is much more than an environmental burden but a raw material with high potential.
| Speaker Country | Austria |
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