FOOD WASTE PROCESSING USING ANAEROBIC DIGESTION: INFLUENCE OF TEMPERATURE AND COMPOSITION

Khairunnisa Nur Madani, Lisendra Marbelia, S.T., M.Sc., Ph.D.

2026 | Tesis | S2 Teknik Kimia

Food waste (FW) is the remaining result of food production consumed by humans. One third of the food consumed by humans is wasted and lost, reaching 1.3 billion tons of food wasted per year. food production requires a lot of resources, food loss and waste are indirectly accompanied by various environmental impacts, such as soil erosion, deforestation, water and air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions that occur in the process of production, storage, transportation, and management of food waste. Food waste has a high concentration of total solids (TS), low pH, and high biodegradation and nutrient rates supporting a good anaerobic digestion process in biogas production. Anaerobic Digestion (AD) is one of the sustainable methods to utilize and manage food waste and convert it into valuable resources such as methane and nutritious digestate. AD is widely used in high concentration organic waste processing applications, organic solid waste and can recover energy in the form of hydrogen, methane and volatile fatty acids (VFA). AD efficiency is influenced by the C/N content factor contained in the raw material. Substrates that have too high N content can inhibit and slow down the degradation process so that it can reduce biogas production. Mechanistic kinetic modeling that links feedstock composition to microbial growth, acidogenesis , and methanogenesis remains limited. One method for investigating the influence of food waste composition in anaerobic digestion is to use the Response Surface Methodology (RSM) method. RSM is a statistical and mathematical method used in designing experiments to evaluate the influence of several variables and determine the optimum conditions of the desired response. The RSM method requires a simplex centroid to design specific experiments in mixture experiments. Therefore, the aim of this study is to study the anaerobic digestion (AD) process of food waste in Indonesia and to find the optimal composition of food waste in the anaerobic digestion (AD) process to obtain high biogas yield.

Food waste (FW) is the remaining result of food production consumed by humans. One third of the food consumed by humans is wasted and lost, reaching 1.3 billion tons of food wasted per year. food production requires a lot of resources, food loss and waste are indirectly accompanied by various environmental impacts, such as soil erosion, deforestation, water and air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions that occur in the process of production, storage, transportation, and management of food waste. Food waste has a high concentration of total solids (TS), low pH, and high biodegradation and nutrient rates supporting a good anaerobic digestion process in biogas production. Anaerobic Digestion (AD) is one of the sustainable methods to utilize and manage food waste and convert it into valuable resources such as methane and nutritious digestate. AD is widely used in high concentration organic waste processing applications, organic solid waste and can recover energy in the form of hydrogen, methane and volatile fatty acids (VFA). AD efficiency is influenced by the C/N content factor contained in the raw material. Substrates that have too high N content can inhibit and slow down the degradation process so that it can reduce biogas production. Mechanistic kinetic modeling that links feedstock composition to microbial growth, acidogenesis , and methanogenesis remains limited. One method for investigating the influence of food waste composition in anaerobic digestion is to use the Response Surface Methodology (RSM) method. RSM is a statistical and mathematical method used in designing experiments to evaluate the influence of several variables and determine the optimum conditions of the desired response. The RSM method requires a simplex centroid to design specific experiments in mixture experiments. Therefore, the aim of this study is to study the anaerobic digestion (AD) process of food waste in Indonesia and to find the optimal composition of food waste in the anaerobic digestion (AD) process to obtain high biogas yield.

Kata Kunci : Anaerobic digestion, Food waste, Biogas