Enhanced Vermicomposting for Combination of Organic Waste through Subsequent Treatment with Selected Microorganisms
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: The high volume of waste dumped per day leads to serious environmental issues. Among the issues is the generation of methane via anaerobic degradation of waste that contributes towards global warming. There are numerous options in minimizing organic waste disposed into landfills. This includes composting and vermicomposting. This research is aimed to investigate the possibility of treating selected organic wastes via vermicomposting using formulated microbial cocktail. Preliminary treatments were conducted to determine the degradation rate via vermicomposting of selected organic wastes namely spent tea, sugar cane bagasse and banana stem. For this purpose, 1 kg of the organic wastes were placed in plastic containers (50cm x 15cm x 25cm) where 10 Eudrillus Eugeniae average size of 5.5cm were introduced. No worms were added into the control set-ups. Three microbial consortia namely M, 3I1 and 3I3 (consisted of Basillusweihenstephanensis, Basilluspumillus, Pseudomonas alcaligenes, Flavobacteriumjohnsoniae, Staphylococcus hominis and Bacillus licheniformis) of were added as the enhancer. With or without the application of 3I3 consortium has the largest difference compared to other experimental setups. It managed to enhance vermicomposting of combination of all three selected organic wastes in equal proportion by approximately 64% resulting with a degradation rate of 2.0 x 10 -1 kg per day. The percentage of reduction for carbon to nitrogen ratio indicated 50% for the same combination of wastes in just 5 days. This results indicates that the microbial consortium prepared via this research were able to enhance of the degradation of organic wastes namely sugar cane bagasse, spent tea and banana stem in different combinations. The use of soil was also eliminated as this research focuses more towards economic approach in managing organic waste. However, more extensive research should be conducted to investigate the commercial viability of this approach since this is only done in laboratory scale.
Source: Journal of Microbiology Research
Authors: K Shamini, S. H. Fauziah
Language: English
Subfield: Soil Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W116153082