Composting of agricultural wastes for their use as container media: Simulation of the composting process

Y. Inbar*, Y. Chen, Y. Hadar, O. Verdonck

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

27 Scopus citations

Abstract

Separated cattle manure (SM) and grape marc (GM), and manure composts of these raw materials, were incubated in a composting simulator for 10 days. The effects of moisture content and addition of nitrogen on the rate of composting were measured in terms of oxygen consumption. Moisture content had a major effect on O2 consumption. The higher the water content, the higher was O2 consumption, which reached a maximum at 60-70% water content. Below 50% moisture, the microbial activity seemed to decline sharply. The O2 consumption was extremely low for the manure composts and was unaffected by the moisture content. No effect was recorded when nitrogen was added to SM. However, the addition of 0·25% (w/w) nitrogen to GM at all moisture levels increased significantly the O2 consumption, except for the mature compost. The most prominent effect of nitrogen addition was exhibited by GM that was composted at 60% moisture.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)247-259
Number of pages13
JournalBiological Wastes
Volume26
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 1988

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