Anaerobik koşullarda biyoplastik bozunmasının biyogaz potansiyeli takibi ile değerlendirilmesi

Biodegradable plastics offer a promising approach to mitigating the adverse impacts of plastic pollution, as they are capable of breaking down either naturally or under controlled conditions. This study investigates the degradation of two widely used bioplastics—polylactic acid (PLA) and polybutylene adipate terephthalate (PBAT)—to assess their influence on biogas production and during anaerobic co-digestion (AD) with food waste under mesophilic conditions. Although the setups containing PLA did not yield clear, comparative results regarding its contribution to biogas production, the experiments involving PBAT produced meaningful outcomes for both inoculum to substrate ratio (ISR) that are ISR of 2:1 and 1:1 conditions. Specifically, PBAT contributed an 8.92% increase in total biogas production in the ISR of 2:1 setup and a 5.00% increase in the ISR of 1:1 setup when compared to the respective control groups. Moreover, gas composition analysis performed using gas chromatography (GC) showed that cumulative biomethane production from PBAT-containing setups reached 438.6 mL for ISR of 2:1 and 15,110.2 mL for ISR of 1:1 by the end of the experiments. Accordingly, the biodegradation rates of PBAT bioplastic in these setups were calculated as 0.78% and 10.05%, respectively.