Finding Sustainable Solutions to the Biowaste Problem
The human population of Earth stood at about 7.3 billion people as of 2016, according to the U.S Census Bureau, a jump of about 1.3 billion people since the year 2000.
And with that massive, ever-growing population comes tremendous amounts of waste – much of it in the form of biological substances.
In the lab of Assistant Professor Rixiang Huang, the goal is to find sustainable solutions to the biowaste problem, with a particular focus on the U.S.
“Significant amounts of solid organic wastes are generated annually from various human activities, such as agriculture, food processing and consumption, and wastewater treatment,” said Huang. “These wastes are important pools of critical elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, thus play important role in their global cycles. The management of these wastes is closely related to the food-energy-water nexus and has significant environmental and socio-economic impacts.”
Huang’s research group revolves around sustainable management of solid biowastes from a life cycle perspective, focusing on technology and process innovations. The researchers use interdisciplinary techniques spanning molecular- to macro-scales to probe the physicochemical and biological processes underlying conventional and innovative treatments and applications of representative organic wastes.
His team is currently working on food waste, agriculture residue, and biosolids. They study the transformation of organic matters, nutrients, and contaminants during microbial and thermochemical treatments of these wastes, with the goal of improving the treatment efficiency and producing products optimal for agriculture recycling.
In addition to laboratory studies, his team is also collaborating with local municipalities, the waste industry, and farmers to study and solve problems that occur in the field.
“One example is how we deal with biowaste in the Capital Region,” said Huang. “Because bio-solids were processed differently in different wastewater treatment plants, it is important to understand how different treatments affect bio-solid quality and behaviors in soil (Figure 1).”
For food waste, because more and more states are starting to ban food waste landfilling (New York recently stepped in), other treatment and disposal options are urgently needed. This is why Huang and his team are also working to study anaerobic co-digestion of food waste, focusing on solving the issues originated from co-digestion.
Dr. Rixiang Huang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental and Sustainable Engineering at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Before joining UAlbany, he was a research scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) from 2016 – 2018. Prior to that, he held postdoctoral fellow positions at Georgia Tech and Baylor University. For more about Dr. Huang's research and publications, visit his faculty page.