A comprehensive review on food waste anaerobic co-digestion: Research progress and tendencies

Food waste (FW) anaerobic digestion systems are prone to imbalance during long-term operation, and the imbalance mechanism is complex. Anaerobic co-digestion (AcoD) of FW and other substrates can overcome the performance limitations of single digestion, allowing for the mutual use of multiple wastes and resource recovery. Research on the AcoD of FW has been widely conducted and successfully applied to a practical engineering scale. Therefore, this review describes the research progress of AcoD of FW with other substrates. By analyzing the problems and challenges faced by AcoD of FW, the synergistic effects and influencing factors of different biomass wastes are discussed, and improvement strategies to improve the performance of AcoD of FW are summarized from different reaction stages of anaerobic digestion. By combing the research progress of AcoD of FW, it provides a reference for the optimization and improvement of the performance of the co-digestion system. [Display omitted] •The research status and strengthening strategy of AcoD of FW was elaborated.•Wastewater sludge is the best co-digestion substrate due to its low C/N ratio.•AcoD has obvious environmental impact benefits through life cycle assessment.•Recycling energy from AcoD of FW is an important way to achieve “carbon neutral”.•The balanced microbial community can be constructed by optimizing the kinetic model.