Microfiltration and Ultrafiltration as Efficient, Sustainable Pretreatment Technologies for Resource Recovery

This study was carried out with the scope of resource recovery platform from the food waste-based organic materials in the presence of in situ microfiltration immersed anaerobic membrane bioreactor. Afterwards, ultrafiltration technology was adopted. These microfiltration and ultrafiltration processes successfully removed larger particles, i.e., suspended solids from the anaerobically digested effluent. Moreover, ultrafiltration membranes (50 kDa) can also be recovered with a high concentration of volatile fatty acids (VFAs) and nutrients. Among them, acetic acid was the dominant VFAs compound. These results are highly interesting with respect to recovering a higher amount of VFAs by the use of nanofiltration technology in future consortium. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.