Performance evaluation of anaerobic digestion technology for energy recovery from organic fraction of municipal solid waste: A review

Anaerobic digestion is one of the most effective and environment-friendly waste management techniques. It not only treats the organic fraction of municipal solid waste, but at the same time it can be considered as one of the potent renewable energy sources due to generation of methane during digestion process. The technology is not new and has been commercialised from early 1980s. But, the data suggests that it is not still widely applied for energy recovery from organic wastes at centralised level. The reason may be poor methane yield due to operational issues and process instability. There were numerous studies already done at the lab scale, now it is the time to replicate the outcomes of lab-scale studies to the full scale plant. Further studies are required to make the anaerobic digestion techno-economically sustainable. This paper presents a detailed review of essential process parameters and identifies gaps and solutions for effective implementation of the anaerobic digestion of organic fraction of municipal solid waste. The paper also presents the effect of co-digestion, pre-treatments and inhibition on the performance of anaerobic digestion. The paper will help the readers in understanding the process, operation and control of anaerobic digestion technology. •Instability of reactor is mainly caused due to variation in process parameters.•Co-digestion is very important in process performance improvement.•Only 9.7% of the operating anaerobic digestion plant involves co-digestion.•Digestate from anaerobic digestion are not recommended for direct application on soil.•Pre-treatment improves digestion efficiency, but increases the cost.