Alkaline Pretreatment of Vegetable Waste and Analysis of Waste Solubilization

Almost all vegetable waste or kitchen refuse generated on a daily basis from daily cooking activities, restaurant kitchens and food processing industries end up in dumping grounds or landfills. In order to avoid the problem of emission of greenhouse gases that ultimately contributes to the global warming, it is necessary for to do a proper waste management. Various sustainable ways to manage this waste include use of waste as fodder or animal feed, composting or bioconversion into biogas or biofuel. The characteristics of the vegetable waste make it suitable for bioconversion. As the wastes are lignocellulosic in nature, they should be pretreated prior to actual conversion, in order to increase the efficiency of the process. The present article studies the effect of sodium carbonate pretreatment on solubilization of vegetable waste. Waste solubilization is analyzed by estimating percentage of soluble COD and reducing sugar contents before and after pretreatments. The 8% sodium carbonate solution was found to show a positive effect on both COD solubilization and increase in reducing sugar content.