Drum Composting of Food Waste: A Kinetic Study

Drum composting is a potential mean to recycle the food waste (FW) at the source of generation in developing countries. The present study reports the kinetics of the composting process conducted in three plastic drums each of 125 L capacity. To facilitate natural aeration, 10 mm diameter holes were provided on the periphery of two drums while one drum was used as control (i.e., without any hole). Moreover, yard waste (YW) was also added to the feed as bulking agent (FW: YW = 2.5: 1 by wt.). The effect of turning and natural aeration was studied during 60 days of composting of food waste. Various physical, chemical and biological parameters were monitored routinely. The time-based organic matter degradation data was used to determine the kinetic parameters according to the first order rate equation. The reaction rate was found to be 0.0105 day-1 (R2 = 0.9605) in the modified drum with regular sample turning. The principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchial cluster analysis (HCA) were used as statistical tools to evaluate the variation between the measured parameters.