Bioresource Technology 255 (2018) 281–287

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Bioresource Technology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/biortech

Electric energy production from food waste: Microbial fuel cells versus T
anaerobic digestion
⁎
Xiaodong Xina,b,1, Yingqun Mab,1, Yu Liub,c,
a
School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150090, PR China
b
Advanced Environmental Biotechnology Centre, Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Cleantech Loop, Singapore
637141, Singapore
c
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798, Singapore

G RA P H I C A L AB S T R A C T

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: A food waste resourceful process was developed by integrating the ultra-fast hydrolysis and microbial fuel cells
Food waste (MFCs) for energy and resource recovery. Food waste was first ultra-fast hydrolyzed by fungal mash rich in
Fungal mash hydrolytic enzymes in-situ produced from food waste. After which, the separated solids were readily converted
Microbial fuel cells to biofertilizer, while the liquid was fed to MFCs for direct electricity generation with a conversion efficiency of
Electricity
0.245 kWh/kg food waste. It was estimated that about 192.5 million kWh of electricity could be produced from
Biofertilize
the food waste annually generated in Singapore, together with 74,390 tonnes of dry biofertilizer. Compared to
anaerobic digestion, the proposed approach was more environmentally friendly and economically viable in
terms of both electricity conversion and process cost. It is expected that this study may lead to the paradigm shift
in food waste management towards ultra-fast concurrent recovery of resource and electricity with zero-solid
discharge.

1. Introduction
Nowadays, the generation of food waste is increasing dramatically
with the rising population and global economic development. In many
countries, food waste, after simple recycling, has been incinerated or
directly landfilled. However, such practices have encountered more and
more critiques because of their obvious drawbacks. For example, in-
cineration is highly energy-intensive, while produces hazardous gases
and ashes. On the other hand, landfill is no longer a viable option due to
the limited land availability and potential contamination of surface and
ground waters. More importantly, no resource and energy can be re-
covered through incineration and landfill. As such, they are not con-
sidered as the environmentally friendly and economically viable ap-
proaches for future food waste management. In addition, efforts have
been dedicated to exploring composting and biofuel production from
food waste (Ma et al., 2017a; Koch et al., 2015; Nicholson et al., 2017).
It should be realized that the high costs associated with biofuel se-
paration and purification have been believed to be an obstacle for its

⁎
Corresponding author at: School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798, Singapore.
E-mail address: cyliu@ntu.edu.sg (Y. Liu).
1
Made equal contribution.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biortech.2018.01.099
Received 5 December 2017; Received in revised form 18 January 2018; Accepted 19 January 2018
Available online 31 January 2018
0960-8524/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
X. Xin et al.
wide application, while slow and land-intensive composting of food
waste may not to have great market potential due to the low value of
compost, emission of greenhouse gases (e.g. ammonia and nitrous
oxide) and leaching of nitrate (Nicholson et al., 2017, Adhikari et al.,
2008).
Anaerobic digestion (AD) of food waste has attracted extensive at-
tention as a sustainable approach for food waste management with the
purposes of volume reduction and energy recovery in form of biogas.
However, existing evidence shows that AD has many drawbacks, such
as long solid retention time of 15 to 20 days, extremely complex process
configuration which is a combination of hydrolysis, acidogenesis,
acetogenesis and methanogenesis, low destruction rate of food waste,
low conversion efficiency of biomethane to electric energy, large foot-
print, uneasy maintenance and in-plant safety issues (Khan et al., 2017;
McCarty et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2014). Moreover, the solid residuals
after the AD of food waste still need to be further treated by incinera-
tion or landfill. These clearly indicate that AD of food waste cannot
serve as a total solution for future food waste management towards
energy and resource recovery with ultimate zero solid discharge.
Recently, extensive research has been reported on microbial fuel
cells (MFCs) for directly converting organic matter to electric energy
without intermediate steps (Li et al., 2014; Adekunle et al., 2017). In
MFCs, the generation of bioelectric energy is considerably determined
by the biodegradation efficiency of organic matter and electron transfer
efficiency (Song et al., 2015). In fact, the performance of MFCs can be
further improved or enhanced by the presence of adequate anodic re-
spiring bacteria (ARB) on the anode (Ge and He, 2016). Therefore, this
study aimed to develop a holistic approach for food waste management,
in which food waste was first hydrolyzed by fungal mash in-situ pro-
duced from food waste, which was rich in various hydrolytic enzymes.
After simple solid-liquid separation, solid residues were directly con-
verted to biofertilizer, while collected hydrolysis liquid was fed to MFCs
for direct generation of electric energy. Furthermore, the engineering
and economic viabilities of MFCs were compared with anaerobic di-
gestion. It is expected that this study can offer new insight into future
food waste management towards fast and efficient energy and resource
recovery with nearly zero-solid discharge.
2. Materials and methods
2.1. The MFCs reactor
A cylinder-type air-cathode single chamber MFCs was used in this
study. A plain carbon cloth-made air-cathode of 1.5-cm in semidiameter
(E-Tek, USA) was assembled into of the MFCs, while a carbon brush was
used as the anode with a total working surface area of 42 cm2. The
external circuit was connected to the cathode and anode by a titanium
wire, with an external resistor (R) of 500 Ω. Voltage output (V) was
monitored by a data acquisition card (USB-miniDAQ, China) which was
linked to a computer for data recording at a time interval of one second.
The 0.5-h mean voltage was reported in this study. The seed sludge
taken from a full-scale wastewater plant in Singapore had the total
solids (TS) of 12.6 g/L and volatile solids (VS) of 9.1 g/L.
2.2. Food waste hydrolysate
The food waste used in this study was collected from a university
canteen was pretreated with the in-situ produced fungal mash rich in
various hydrolytic enzymes for 8 h, after which, the liquid and solid
were separated according to the method by Ma et al. (2017c). The se-
parated liquid was diluted to about 1200 mg/L COD and was then fed to
the MFC. This diluted liquid contained soluble carbohydrate of
585.2 ± 28.5 mg COD/L, soluble protein of 526 ± 32.6 mg COD/L
and volatile fatty acids of 21 ± 4.1 (mg COD/L). The nutrient com-
position in the MFC feed was detailed as follows: phosphate buffer
solution (PBS) with 0.310 g/L NH4Cl, 0.130 g/L KCl, 4.576 g/L
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Bioresource Technology 255 (2018) 281–287
Na2HPO4·12 H2O and 2.452 g/L NaH2PO4·2H2O, mineral nutrients in-
cluding 3.00 g/L MgSO4, 0.500 g/L MnSO4·H2O, 1.000 g/L NaCl,
0.100 g/L FeSO4·7H2O, 0.100 g/L CaCl2·2H2O, 0.100 g/L CoCl2·6H2O,
0.13 g/L ZnCl2, 0.010 g/L CuSO4·5H2O, 0.025 g/L Na2MoO4 and
0.025 g/L Na2WO4·2H2O and Vitamins solution with 0.200 g/L Vitamin
H, 0.200 g/L Folic acid, 1.000 g/L Pyridoxine, 0.500 g/L Riboflavin,
0.500 g/L Vitamin B1, 0.010 g/L Vitamin B12 and 0.500 g/L Niacin.
The liquid samples taken from the MFCs were used for determination of
COD concentration. The biofilm samples were collected from the anode
by water flushing, and the collected samples were subject to cen-
trifugation at 7000 rpm for 10 min. Harvest biomass was used for
genomic DNA extraction and further analysis.
2.3. Analyses and calculations
The COD was determined by the Hach kits (Hach, US), while TS and
VS were measured according to the weighing method. All the experi-
ments were conducted at 25 °C with an initial pH of 7.0. The major
metal contents (e.g. K, Cd, Hg, Pb, Cr and As) in the separated solid
after the pretreatment of food waste with the fungal mash were de-
termined by Microwave Plasma Atomic Emission Spectrometer (MP-
AES, Agilent 4100, America). Total carbon in the separated solids was
determined according to the method by Navarro et al. (1993). Total
nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP in P2O5) in the solid were
measured using the Chinese standard methods (GB/T 8572-2010; GB/
T17767.2-2010), respectively (Chinese National Standard, 2010a,b).
The current density (I) was obtained as follows:
I= U/( R× A) (1)
where U is the output voltage (V), R is the external resistance (Ω) and A
is the effective working area of anode (m2).
The power density (P) can be further calculated as:
P= U 2/( R× A) (2)
In order to generate the power density curve, at the stable voltage
output, the corresponding current density (I) and power density (P)
were calculated by reducing the external resistance from 5000 kΩ to
500 Ω at a step of 500 Ω. The current density at each applied resistance
was plotted as the x-axis against the corresponding power density (P) as
the y-axis.
The electric energy (E in kW/kg COD) produced by the MFC could
be calculated as follows:
(U 2/R)t
E=
(1.2 × 10−3kg COD/L × 90% × 0.028L) × 3.6 × 106 (3)
5
where t is the operation time (s), i.e. 2 days = 1.72 × 10 s) in this
study and the average COD removal efficiency of 90% was used.
On the other hand, the theoretical electricity generation (TEG) via
methane combustion can be obtained as follows:
TEG = M·(−ΔU)·A·B (4)
where M is the total methane production (m ), −ΔU is the energy of
3
combustion at constant volume for methane, equal to 40 MJ/m3 (Gupta
et al., 2015), A was the conversion coefficient of methane chemical
energy to electricity through combustion, i.e. 35% (McCarty et al.,
2011) and B is the conversion coefficient of energy (MJ) to electric
energy (kWh), i.e. 0.28 (Ma et al., 2017a).
2.4. Microbial community analysis
The DNA extraction was performed according the protocol provided
by the FastDNA Spin Kit. Fragments of 16S rRNA gene containing the
V3-V4 regions were amplified from the extracted DNA using primer
sets: the former primer of 341F (CCCTACACGACGCTCTTCCGATCTG-
barcode-CCTACGGGNGGCWGCAG) and the reverse primer of 805R
(GACTGGAGTTCCTTGGCACCCGAGAATTCCAGACTACHVG- GGTATC
X. Xin et al. Bioresource Technology 255 (2018) 281–287

TAATCC). The PCR system contained 2 × Taq master Mix (15 µl), Bar-
PCR primer F (10 µM) (1 µl), Primer R (10 μM) (1 µl), Genomic DNA
(10–20 ng) and ddH2O add to 30 µl. After the amplification, the PCR
products were purified using the PCR Purification Kit (Sangon, China).
The purified PCR products were outsourced to the Illumina MiSeq
Sequencing Service (Sangon, China). The species taxonomy was de-
termined according to the OTUs obtained from the MiSeq sequencing
analysisassigned by the RDP classifier (http://rdp.cme.msu.edu/misc/
resources.jsp). The α-diversity estimators of microbial populations were
generated using Mothur (version 1.30.1) (http://www.mothur.org/
wiki/Schloss_SOP#Alpha_ diversity), containing the richness estima-
tors of Ace index and Chao1 index and the α-diversity estimators of
Simpson index, Shannon index and the coverage.

3. Results and discussion

3.1. Concurrent production of electricity and biofertilizer from food waste

The food waste collected from the university canteen was subject to
an ultra-fast 8-h hydrolysis with the in-situ produced fungal mash. After
which, 1 kg of food waste was converted to 0.41 kg of solid residues and
2.53 L of hydrolysis liquid (Table 1). The liquid fed to the MFCs for
direct electricity production contained 99.0 g/L of soluble COD, of
which 46%, 42% and 2% were carbohydrates, proteins and volatile
fatty acids (VFAs), respectively. Meanwhile, Fig. 1A showed that the
harvested solid residues with adequate contents of C as total carbon, N
as TN, P as P2O5 and K as K2O could be readily used as biofertilizer
according to the Standards of Organic-Inorganic Compound Fertilizer
(GB18877-2009) (Chinese National Standard, 2009). Although the TK
(K2O) content in the produced solid residues was slightly lower than the
standard value, the low K content could be easily adjusted by mixing
with commercial fertilizer or addition of inorganic potassium (Ma et al.,
2017b). It should also be noted that the contents of various types of
heavy metals in the solid residues were all within the limits of the
Chinese National Standard for fertilizer (Chinese National Standard,
2009; Chinese National Standard, 1987) (Fig. 1B). Obviously, the solid
residues produced from food waste could be considered safe for agri- Fig. 1. Compositions of the solids produced from the food waste after 8 h ultra-fast hy-
culture applications. In fact, this approach may also offer a promising drolysis with fungal mash. SV means the standard value in the Chinese Standards of
Organic-Inorganic Compound Fertilizer (GB18877-2009). A: Nutrients; B: Heavy metals.
option for future food waste management with the aim for resource
recovery. Based on the data presented in Table 1, about 74,390 tonnes
of dry biofertilizer could be produced from 785,500 tonnes of food (Fig. 2A), with the maximum power density of 0.173 W/m2 (Fig. 2B) at
waste annually generated in Singapore (Singapore NEA, 2016). Singa- the influent COD of about 1.2 g/L. In addition, more than 90% of COD
pore does not have strong agricultural activity, and only about 600 ha was removed in the steady state of MFCs. Under the similar conditions,
land have been deployed to over 200 farms in 2014 (Singapore AVA, the power generation efficiency from the hydrolysis liquid of food waste
2017). These imply that the total amount of fertilizer needed for Sin- appeared to be 1.60- and 1.47-times higher than those produced from
gapore agriculture was only about 646 tonnes per year at the annual glucose and acetate as feeds, respectively (date not shown). These re-
fertilizer consumption rate of 1076.8 kg per hectare per year (The sults suggested that the hydrolysis liquid from food waste can serve as
World Bank data, 2017). It appears that the biofertilizer produced from an excellent feed to MFCs for direct electricity production. Although
Singapore food waste is more than enough to meet the local agriculture significant improvements have been made to MFCs so far, the power
demand, while the remaining 73,744 tonnes of biofertilizer produced density of MFCs is still considered below the level of practical appli-
from food waste can be exported to other countries with strong agri- cations. However, with rapid development in material engineering and
cultural industry in the Southeast Asia (Kwan et al., 2015; Ong et al., surface coating technology, a recent study had shown that the power
2018). density of a polypyrrole-coated bacterial electrode was found to be 14.1
Fig. 2 showed the bioelectrogenesis output and the abundances of times higher than that without such coating (Song et al., 2017). With
ARB in the MFCs fed with the liquid produced from food waste pre- continuous effort put into MFCs, it is reasonable to anticipate that high-
treated by fungal mash. It was found that the output voltage of the performance MFCs would sooner be possible for industrial applications.
MFCs gradually stabilized at 0.57 V after the two-week operation Fig. 2C further revealed a highly diversified ARB consortium in the

Table 1
The proposed innovative approach for sustainable food waste management.

Pretreatment Solid-liquid separation Application Solid residue

1 kg of food waste 8 h ultra-fast hydrolysis by fungal mash Solids: 0.41 kg with 76.9% water content Converted to biofertilizer Zero-solid discharge
Liquid: 2.53 L Fed to MFCs for electricity generation
With 99.0 g SCOD/L

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X. Xin et al. Bioresource Technology 255 (2018) 281–287

Fig. 2. Electric energy production and relative abundances of main ARB in the MFCs fed with the hydrolysis liquid of food waste. A: Voltage output; B: Power density; C: Relative
abundances of main ARB.

steady-state MFCs fed with the hydrolysis liquid of food waste, with
19.8% of Moheibacter, 18.4% of Azospirillum, 6.6% of Geobacter, 4.6% of
Petrimonas, 5.2% of Alicycliphilus, 3.8% of Rhodococcus and 3.2% of
Pseudomonas. It had been reported that Petrimonas and Moheibacter
were highly responsible for degradation of carbohydrates in anaerobic
condition (Ito et al., 2012), while Geobacter, Pseudomonas and Alicycli-
philus were closely related to the electricity generation in MFCs (Logan,
2009; Xie et al., 2014; Song et al., 2015).
3.2. Energy harvesting from food waste: MFCs versus AD
The factors affecting the adoption of appropriate technologies to-
wards waste to energy should be taken into account in the process
development, e.g. process efficiency, process operability, economic
viability, operation safety etc. (Hagos et al., 2017; Khan et al., 2017). So
far, anaerobic digestion has been applied widely for energy recovery
from food waste. Recently, Ma et al. (2017b) developed an innovative
approach by which the liquid produced from food waste with the fungal
mash pretreatment was fed to an anaerobic digester for biogas pro-
duction. However, the biogas produced from AD shall need further
combustion for generating electricity by a combined heat-power gen-
erator, but with extra emission of GHGs (e.g. carbon dioxide). Fig. 3
compared the energy (electricity) recovery potentials from food waste
through the two approaches, i.e. hydrolysis liquid-fed AD (Approach 1)
and hydrolysis liquid-fed MFCs (Approach 2). In Approach 1, about
54.4 L of methane could be obtained from 1 kg of food waste, equiva-
lent to about 0.213 kWh electricity (TEG), while about 0.245 kWh
electricity was achieved directly in Approach 2. In Singapore, about
785,500 metric tonnes of food waste was produced in 2015 (Singapore
NEA, 2016). As can be seen in Fig. 3, with this amount of food waste,
total 167.5 million kWh of electricity would be generated from Ap-
proach 1 versus 192.5 million kWh of electricity from Approach 2. It
should be noted that AD is associated with some inefficiencies relating
to methane generation and causing considerable energy loss (Khan
et al., 2017; McCarty et al., 2011). Moreover, the retention time re-
quired in AD was 11 days against 2 days in the MFCs. This suggested
that the size of MFCs reactor could be 5.5 time smaller than that of the
anaerobic digester, leading to substantial land saving. As illustrated in
Fig. 3, the processing of methane gas towards electricity recovery is
much more complex than the single MFCs. For example, prior to
combustion, a storage vessel for methane gas is inevitably needed,
which has a larger footprint and may cause many concerns with regard
to safety and maintenance. In Approach 1, about 42.73 million m3 of
methane gas could be produced from the Singapore’s food waste by AD
(Ma et al. 2017b). Prior to its combustion, this amount of methane gas
should first be compressed for the purpose of storage and transport at a
compression cost of S$ 0.08–0.2 per cubic meter of methane gas, i.e. a
total compression cost of about S$ 3.42–8.55 million (Barnstable
County Wastewater Cost Task Force ,2010). Obviously, such a process
complexity and additional operation cost will be avoided in Approach 2
with MFCs. Moreover, the compressed methane gas needs to be com-
busted to produce high pressure steam which drives steam turbine for
electricity generation. It is obvious that the combustion-electricity
generation process of methane gas is extremely complicated and costly

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X. Xin et al.
Fig. 3. Comparison of Approaches 1 and 2 in terms of energy and resource recovery from food waste.
Table 2
The comparison of Approaches 1 and 2 developed in this study: Singapore situation.
Competitive Analysis Approach 1
End products 74.4 million kg dry biofertilizer and 42.7 million m3 CH4 (i.e. 167.5
million kWh electricity)
Revenue of Products (SGD) 145
Capital construction, operation and Complex process for biogas to electricity, include Storage, transport
maintenance and combustion
Retention time 10–15 days
Footprint Large
CO2 emission More
1 kWh = 0.20 SGD; 1 kg biofertilizer = 1.5 SGD.
in terms of capital investment, operational and maintenance costs as
compared to the one-step electricity production by MFCs. Furthermore,
the process comparisons of Approaches 1 and 2 were presented in
Table 2. It can be seen from Table 2 that the solid retention time in the
AD-based Approach 1 was in the range of 10–15 days which was much
longer than that adopted in the MFCs-based Approach 2, i.e. for a given
treatment capacity, the footprint and the capital cost required for Ap-
proach 1 should be much higher than those for Approach 2. Moreover,
in Approach 1, multiple complex processes will be needed for con-
verting methane gas to electricity, including gas storage, combustion
for co-generation of heat and power etc., with extra emission of GHGs.
On the contrary, Approach 2 appeared to be much simpler and the
whole process could be completed within 2 days, with more energy
recovered from food waste. Thus, it is reasonable consider that the
MFCs-based approach developed in this study offers a more feasible and
economically viable option towards environmentally friendly food
waste management.
The overall balances on energy and resource recovery from
Singapore food waste were summarized in Fig. 3. After the ultra-fast
hydrolysis with fungal mash, the total 785,500 tonnes food waste was
converted to 322 million kg of solid with a moisture content of 76.9%,
while 1.99 million cubic meters of liquid with 99 g/L of SCOD was
produced, equivalent to a total 197 million kg of SCOD. The separated
solids could be further converted to 74.4 million kg of dry biofertilizer,
while 167.5 million kWh or 192.45 million kWh electricity could be
285
Bioresource Technology 255 (2018) 281–287
Approach 2
74.4 million kg dry biofertilizer and 192.5 million kWh
electricity
150
Easy
2 days
Small
Less
generated from the separated liquids by AD or MFCs.
In Singapore, food waste after recycling is incinerated for volume
reduction, with the substantial energy consumption and the generation
of a huge amount of carbon dioxide. On the other hand, it has been well
known that the current wastewater treatment is highly energy in-
tensive. For example, the one local water reclamation plant has a de-
signed treatment capacity of 0.8 million m3/day, i.e. 292 million m3/
year, with the unit energy consumption of 0.52 kW h/m3 (Cao, 2011;
Cao et al., 2016). As presented above, about 192.4 million kWh of
electricity can be generated by MFCs with the food waste in Singapore,
which is not only enough to offset the total energy consumption of
151.8 million kWh/year in the above water reclamation plant, but also
will export extra 40.6 million kWh of electricity to the urban power
grid, with a commercial value of about S$ 8.1 million at the unit
electricity cost of S$ 0.2/kW h.
As discussed above, Approach 2 developed in this study has a beauty
of simplicity and compactness which may offer a great possibility of co-
locating food waste and municipal wastewater treatment plants as il-
lustrated in Fig. 4. The concept of co-location will open a new window
for future sustainable food waste and wastewater management with
energy-neutral or even positive operation. In fact, the co-location con-
cept had been demonstrated to be technically sound and economically
viable (Lohrey and Kochergin, 2012; Moreno-Garcia et al., 2017). For
example, a co-located algae production facility and a cane sugar mill
could produce 5.8 million liters of biodiesel per year with reduced CO2
X. Xin et al.
Fig. 4. Conceptual illustration of co-located Food Waste Treatment and Municipal wastewater Reclamation Plants.
emission by 15% (Lohrey and Kochergin, 2012). As illustrated in Fig. 4,
compared to separated treatment facilities of food waste and waste-
water, it is obvious that co-located system has advantages of (i) the
synergistic use of energy and materials; (ii) the integration with other
local business and industrial activities (e.g. incineration etc.); (iii) the
sharing of the industrial equipment for harvesting and conditioning
biomass, which further helps to reduce the capital and operational costs
(Moreno-Garcia et al., 2017). It should be realized that the co-locating
concept as shown in Fig. 4 indeed offers new insights into future food
waste and wastewater management with the aims to maximize energy
and resource recovery.
4. Conclusion
This study proposed an innovative food waste resourceful approach
for high-efficiency energy and resource recovery. By adopting this ap-
proach, 74,390 tonnes of dry biofertilizer and 192.5 million kWh of
electricity could be produced from the Singapore’s food waste annually.
Based on the results obtained, the concept of co-locating food waste and
wastewater treatment facilities was put forward. This indeed offers the
great possibility for future management of food waste and wastewater
towards more efficient recovery of energy and resource. Consequently,
it is expected that this study can help to re-shape the thinking about
future food waste and wastewater management.
Acknowledgements
This study was supported financially by China Scholarship Council
(CSC, 201606120198) and a research grant (Grant no: ETRP 1201 105-
2) from the National Environment Agency of Singapore.
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