Characteristics and anaerobic digestion performances of kitchen wastes.

The characteristics of wastes from breakfast,lunch and dinner were investigated and de-termined,including total solids(TS),volatile solids(VS),carbohydrate,protein,lipids,and inor-ganic salt concentrations.The digestibility of three kinds of kitchen wastes were tested in batch anaerobic digesters.The results showed that there were large differences between breakfast waste and lunch/dinner wastes,especially,the Na+,Ca2+ and Cl-contents in breakfast waste is higher than the other two.It was found that the characteristics of kitchen wastes influenced the biogas production performance and organic matter removal.The accumulative methane yield of breakfast waste,lunch waste and dinner waste were 212.2,331.6 and 362.4 ml/g VS,respectively.The biogas production from breakfast waste was 36% and 41.4% lower than lunch waste and dinner waste,re-spectively,which probably resulted from the high Cl-content in breakfast waste.