Treatment and Valorization of Agro-Industrial Anaerobic Digestate Using Activated Carbon Followed by Spirulina platensis Cultivation

Abstract

The increased production of biogas through the anaerobic digestion (AD) process has raised several concerns regarding the management of liquid digestate, which can present some environmental risks if not properly handled. Among the different techniques to treat AD digestate, microalgae and cyanobacteria cultivation has emerged as a sustainable approach to valorizing digestate while producing valuable biomass for production of biofuels and high value bioproducts. However, the intrinsic parameters of the liquid digestate can strongly limit the microalgae or cyanobacteria growth as well as limit the uptake of residual nutrients. In this study, the detoxification potential of activated carbon (AC) was evaluated on agro-industrial liquid digestate prior to Spirulina platensis cultivation. Different doses of AC, ranging from 5 to 100 g/L, were tested during adsorption experiments in order to determine the adsorption capacity as well as the removal efficiency of several compounds. Experimental results showed the high reactivity of AC, especially towards phosphate (PO4-P), total phenol (TP) and chemical oxygen demand (COD). At a dosage of 50 g/L, the AC pretreatment successfully achieved 54.7%, 84.7% and 50.0% COD, TP and PO4-P removal, corresponding to adsorption capacity of 94.7 mgDCO/g, 17.9 mgTP/g and 8.7 mgPO4-P/g, respectively. Even if the AC pretreatment did not show significant effects on Spirulina platensis growth during toxicity assays, the AC adsorption step strongly participated in the digestate detoxification by removing hardly biodegradable molecules such as phenolic compounds.