Anaerobic digestion of biodegradable plastics: performances and microbial diversity

Growing concern regarding non-biodegradable plastics and the impact of these materials on the environment has promoted interest in biodegradable plastics. Biodegradable plastics offer additional waste management options (e.g., anaerobic digestion or composting) over conventional plastics. However, the treatment of biodegradable plastics under anaerobic digestion is only in its infancy. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to investigate the fate of biodegradable plastics in anaerobic digestion systems and the microorganisms involved in the plastic conversion to methane. For this purpose, batch anaerobic digestion experiments were performed on the main biodegradable polymers and on three commercial blends of biodegradable polymer, under both mesophilic and thermophilic conditions. Only Poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) and Thermoplastic starch (TPS) exhibited rapid (25-50 days) and important (57-80.3% and 80.2-82.6%, respectively) conversion to methane under both mesophilic and thermophilic condition. Methane production rates from poly(lactic acid) (PLA) was very low under mesophilic condition, to such an extent that 500 days were required to reach the ultimate methane production, corresponding to a PLA conversion to methane of 74.7-80.3%. Methane production rate from PLA was greatly enhanced under thermophilic condition since only 60 to 100 days were required to reach the same ultimate methane production. Lactate-utilizing bacteria such as Tepidimicrobium, Moorella and Tepidanaerobacter were revealed to be important during the thermophilic digestion of PLA. Similarly, starch-degrading bacteria (from Clostridium genus) were highlighted during TPS digestion at 38 deg. C and 58 deg. C. Previously known PHB degraders (i.e., Enterobacter, Ilyobacter delafieldii and Cupriavidus) were observed during mesophilic and thermophilic AD of PHB. The low biodegradation rate of most of the biodegradable plastics in mesophilic anaerobic digesters is a major hindrance to their introduction at industrial scale. Thermal (at 120 or 150 deg. C) and thermo-alkaline (at 70 deg. C or 90 deg. C with calcium hydroxide addition) pretreatments were successfully implemented on PLA. These strategies were tested on PLA, which is one of the main biodegradable polymer, accounting for 25% of the biodegradable plastic production. PLA pretreated with these treatments, achieved biodegradation yield of 73% after 15-20 days; a similar biodegradation yield was obtained after 500 days for untreated PLA. PHB and PLA are among the most studied polymer to replace conventional plastics. Finally, the stability and performances of the co-digestion of these plastics (with and without PLA pretreatment) with food wastes fed semi-continuously under mesophilic conditions was investigated. The addition of biodegradable plastics resulted in a more stable process (in comparison with stand-alone biowastes reactor) and no negative effects could be detected. PHB was estimated to be fully biodegraded in the reactors. By contrast, PLA was accumulating in the reactor, and an average biodegradation of 47.6% was estimated during the third hydraulic retention time. Thermo-alkaline pretreatment of PLA improved the biodegradation yield of PLA to 77.5%. The identification of specific microorganisms implicated in the biodegradable plastic degradation was complicated; the majority of the microorganisms correlated with the methane production from reactors co-digesting PLA and PHB were implicated in the anaerobic digestion of the biowaste, which can be explained by the low proportion of biodegradable plastics introduced. (author)