Abstract

A study on carbon dioxide & ammonia evolved during composting of solid agricultural waste

Author(s): Shilpa Tripathi, J.K.Srivastava, Nitesh Parmar

In the modern era of industrialization, the solid waste such as agricultural waste, municipal solid waste, food waste, papers waste etc. are increasing at an alarming rate. The annual production of these wastes in India is around one million tons and with only a fewmodern landfills available, themajority ofwaste are still disposed of in dumpswhich give rise to other environmental problems such as emission of harmful gases like carbon dioxide, ammonia etc. which affects the environment badly. Therefore the best solution of solid waste management is composting. In the present work the composting of solid agro waste & food waste incubated with municipal waste was studied. The carbon dioxide & ammonia evolved were measured at a regular interval so as to determine the effect of microbial degradation. It was observed that higher CO2 production rates appear due to presence of more readily decomposable substrate (agro waste) and of a higher microbial population concentration present due to seeding with Municipal SolidWaste. Similarly the ammonia production rate initially increases due to the presence of higher N2 content and then decreases due to its consumption by microorganism for their survival & growth.