Advances in Biorefining of Biowaste

Dear Colleagues,

during the past decades, under the framework of sustainability and circular economy, there has been an intense legislative focus on the management of organic waste and biowaste. According to two key European directives (1999/31/EC and 2008/98/EC), organic waste needs to be diverted from landfilling and needs to be valorized. Low technology composting of organic waste at the community or household level (which is highly promoted lately by municipalities) could be considered as a re-use and even a prevention technique, instead of a recycling technique. Thus, it would automatically promote it to the highest position of the waste hierarchy; however, its potential application is limited to site specific cases. Much focus has been recently given on more complex valorization techniques that aim to recover useful products during organic waste biological processes using biorefining schemes (e.g. recovery of enzymes during solid state fermentation, hydrogen production during anaerobiosis, biomass derived bioethanol). Some of them are still performed only at the laboratory or pilot scale and industrial applications are still pending. The above techniques are in addition to the classical compost and methane recovery processes that are normally the final part of the overall refining process. Such novel refining techniques will certainly allow a fully sustainable biowaste management.

This Special Issue will focus on biorefining of organic (solid) waste, as viewed through the prism of circular economy, and will cover the following state of the art topics:

• Organic waste source separation schemes: decentralized vs centralized schemes.
• Characterization of municipal and industrial biowaste.
• Valorization of organic waste and recovery of useful compounds/materials.
• Home and community composting.
• Waste-based bioethanol generation.
• Hydrogen production via anaerobic digestion.
• Biogas refining and upgrading.
• Life cycle analysis of biorefining techniques in organic waste management.
• State of the art in MBT technologies for municipal solid waste management.

Prof. Dimitrios Komilis
Prof. Paolo S. Calabrò
Guest Editors

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