Changes and composition of microbial community during aerobic composting of household food waste

Abstract

In order to explore the effect of added bacteria on microbial community and determine the dominant bacteria in the aerobic composting process of household food waste (HFW), two groups of HFW composting experiments were conducted for 30 days. The final degradation rates of the two groups were 69.95% (group A, natural composting) and 73.52% (Group C, composting with added bacteria), respectively. 16S rRNA high-throughput sequencing was used to analyze the changes of microbial community in the composting process. As the result displays, at the classification of phylum level, the relatively abundant bacteria of two groups were Firmicutes, Proteobacteria and Cyanobacteria. At the classification of genus level, Pediococcus is the dominant bacteria of group A, which performed better in maintaining the microbial community stable in the later stage of composting, while Weissella accounted for a relatively large proportion of group C and behaved well in promoting the final degradation rate of composting. The proportion of Ochrobactrum in the early stage of group C is considerable and it is closely related to the removal of odour during composting. The relative abundance of added bacteria was always in a rather low level, suggested that the way they affect the composting process is to change the proportion of dominant bacteria in different stage of composting. This experiment provides an important reference for improving the microbial degradation efficiency of HFW. IMPORTANCE In recent years, food waste has gradually become a global problem, the annual waste of food is as high as 1.3 billion tons. FW, especially HFW, as a high content of organic matter waste, has a pretty good recycling value. So how to deal with and recycle it efficiently, quickly and conveniently becomes more and more important. Among many treatment and recovery methods, microbial treatment (including anaerobic digestion and aerobic composting) has gradually become a research hotspot due to its advantages of low pollution and low energy consumption, and microorganisms play a crucial role in these process. In this study we use 16S rRNA high-throughput sequencing method to explore aerobic composting of HFW. The purpose of this study is to find out the dominant bacteria which can improve the degradation efficiency, remove the odor and prolong the treatment cycle, and then provide further theoretical reference for future HFW related research.