Solid waste stabilization and potential GHG mitigation using vermitechnology

Abstract

With increasing urbanization and industrialization, there is generation of enormous amounts of different solid wastes. Increased proliferation of green landscape areas, institutions, hotels and restaurants generates lawn (LW) and kitchen wastes (KW) which has major management concerns. Institution mess generates huge Chapter 1: Introduction 2 amount of biodegradable organic wastes (Bharadwaj., 2010). The most prominent of these biodegradable wastes includes lawn waste and uncooked vegetable waste produced from hostels mess, canteen, lawn and garden of education institutions, hotels and restaurants. Lawn waste as well as vegetable waste produced in bulk from a common source are hard to manage at large scale because lawn waste has high lignocellulosic content that makes it difficult to decompose. Moreover, unmanaged uncooked waste causes unaesthetic condition and putrefaction when dumped openly. It has been estimated that 1.3 billion metric tons of food is wasted annually that is approximately equal to one-third of the total food production (Hanc and Pliva., 2013). On the other hand, yard waste generation is also rising continuously due to proliferation of green urbanized areas which is one of the greatest contributors of municipal solid waste (Kumar et al., 2010; EPA., 2014; Wei et al., 2017).Yard waste comprises of pruned waste from trees and shrubs like detritus waste, green leaves and grass clippings from lawn that are produced from gardens, municipal parks, and domestic dwellings. Management of lawn waste, which is most prominently produced yard waste is costly due to their collection and transportation to the treatment facilitating establishment. That is why, kitchen waste and lawn waste are very often openly dumped, burned or thrown to the landfill along with the toxic, non biodegradable and hazardous waste materials