High rate biogas production from waste textiles

Abstract: Textile is a global product used by all people in the world. These textiles after the use are thrown into the trash for incineration or land filling. However an efficient way that can be used to produce more energy, in an environmentally friendly process is anaerobic digestion. Waste textiles which contain cellulosic fibers (e.g. Cotton and viscose) can be converted to biogas. In this study, the performance of a two-stage anaerobic digestion process for biogas production from four different materials, including untreated jeans, treated jeans, cotton, and starch was studied. Starch was used as an easy-to-digest material to compare its digestion with that of cellulosic materials.The two-stage processes were composed of a CSTR (for hydrolysis) and a UASB (for methanogenisis) which were investigated in two different configurations, namely (closed and open systems). In the closed system, the outlet of UASB was completely returned back to the CSTR, while in the open system the UASB outlet was sent to sewage. In a stepwise progress, the OLR was aimed to increase from 2 to 20 g Vs per L per day along with reduction in hydraulic retention time from 10 days to 1 day.The results showed that the closed system was more stable when compared to the open system. The pre-treatment of jeans by NMMO helped to produce methane as that of cotton. The hydraulic retention time was decreased to less than 9 days for treated jeans and less than 5 days for starch. The overall methane yield at OLR of 4 gVS per L per day for starch and treated jeans was 98.5% and 97.4% in the closed system, whereas in the open system the yield was 77.0% and 35.5%, respectively.Another experiment was conducted to compare the performance of two-stage process with that of a single stage process of anaerobic digestion of textiles containing polyester and cotton or viscose. Viscose textiles produced more gas compared to the cotton textile; it may be due to the higher crystalline of cotton which makes it hard to be degraded by the microorganisms. Furthermore, two-stage process could able to produce more methane than the single stage process.The parameters like total solids, volatile solids, pH, gas production, gas composition, concentration of nutrients, and COD were also analyzed for both of the experiments.