Evaluation of Three Feasible Biodegradation Models for Food Waste

Food waste is produced from food factories, food services, and home kitchens. The generated mass reached 5.4 million tons/year in 2020. The basic management technology for such waste has been biological degradation under an anaerobic environment. However, the whole process is intrinsically slow and considerably affected by the inner physicochemical properties of the waste and other surrounding conditions, which makes optimization of the process difficult. The most promising options to counter this massive generation of waste are eco-friendly treatments or recycling. As a preliminary step for these options, attempts were made to evaluate the feasibility and usability of three simulative models based on reaction kinetics. Model (A) predicted relative changes over reaction time for reactant, intermediate, and product. Overall, an increased reaction rate produced less intermediate and more product, thereby leading to a shorter total reaction time. Particle diminishing model (B) predicted reduction of the total waste mass. The smaller particles diminished faster along with the dominant effect of microbial reaction. In Model (C), long-chain cellulose was predicted to transform into reducing sugar. At a standard condition, 48% of cellulose molecules having 10⁵ repeating units turned into reducing sugar after 100 h. Also it was found that the optimal enzyme concentration where the highest amount of remnant sugar was harvested was 1 mg L^-1.