Co-Composting of Various Residual Organic Waste and Olive Mill Wastewater for Organic Soil Amendments

Abstract

The valorization of different organic residues like municipal solid wastes, sewage sludge and olive mill wastewater is becoming more and more worrying in the different modern communities and is becoming relevant and crucial in terms of environmental preservation. The choice of the treatment technique should not be only from the point of view of economic profitability but, above all, must consider the efficiency of the treatment method. Thus, an attempt to remove polyphenols from olive mill wastewater would have a double interest: on the one hand, to solve a major environmental problem and to recover and valorize the olive mill wastewater for advanced applications in food processing and soil amendments. It is also interesting to think of associating two harmful wastes by co-composting such as sewage sludge-vegetable gardens, sewage sludge-municipal solid waste, and green wastes-olive mill wastewater…, to get a mixed compost of good physical–chemical and biological qualities useful for agricultural soil fertilization. Finally, in order to be more practical, we will describe specifically in this chapter a new variant of composting and co-composting technology intended for waste treatment that is very simple, inexpensive and easy to implement.