Polylactide (PLA) as a Cell Carrier in Mesophilic Anaerobic Digestion—A New Strategy in the Management of PLA

Abstract

The management of waste polylactide (PLA) in various solutions of thermophilic anaerobic digestion (AD) is problematic and often uneconomical. This paper proposes a different approach to the use of PLA in mesophilic AD, used more commonly on the industrial scale, which consists of assigning the function of a microbial carrier to the biopolymer. The study involved the testing of waste wafers and waste wafers and cheese in a co-substrate system, combined with digested sewage sludge. The experiment was conducted on a laboratory scale, in a batch bioreactor mode. They were used as test samples and as samples with the addition of a carrier: WF—control and WFC—control; WF + PLA and WFC + PLA. The main objective of the study was to verify the impact of PLA in the granular (PLAG) and powder (PLAP) forms on the stability and efficiency of the process. The results of the analysis of physicochemical properties of the carriers, including the critical thermal analysis by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), as well as the amount of cellular biomass of Bacillus amyloliquefaciens obtained in a culture with the addition of the tested PLAG and PLAP, confirmed that PLA can be an effective cell carrier in mesophilic AD. The addition of PLAG produced better results for bacterial proliferation than the addition of powdered PLA. The highest level of dehydrogenase activity was maintained in the WFC + PLAG system. An increase in the volume of the methane produced for the samples digested with the PLA granules carrier was registered in the study. It went up by c.a. 26% for WF, from 356.11 m3 Mg−1 VS (WF—control) to 448.84 m3 Mg−1 VS (WF + PLAG), and for WFC, from 413.46 m3 Mg−1 VS, (WFC—control) to 519.98 m3 Mg−1 VS (WFC + PLAG).