Since my top post is about biogas from chicken dung, i think it’s good to write thing about other environmental things. Now, I’m taking a subject that called “Environmental Biotechnology”, which is “Blue Biotechnology” based on my Professor. FYI, there are many kinds of biotechnology, which are White Biotech (learn about microorganism usage for industry), Green Biotech (learn about agricultural biotechnology), Red Biotech ( learn about medicine purposes), and Blue Biotech (learn about water treatment using microorganism).

Blue Biotechnology

In this subject, we mainly discussed about how wastewater treatment process in industrial and municipal. Generally, there are three main process of WWT, which are aerobics, anaerobic, and anoxic. All these process reduce organic complex compound that is contained in sewage water. The aerobic process using O2 as electron acceptor and convert these organic compound to water and carbon dioxide. While, the anaerobic process using CO2 as electron acceptor to convert organic compound to be methane gas  using hydrolysis, acidogenethic, and methanogenetic reaction. The anoxic process is useful to convert the nitrate to be N2 gas in denitrification reaction.

anaerobic digester

One thing that very interesting for me is usage of anaerobic process to convert municipal waste become biogas. Today, my class has visited by Swedish named Dr.Anita Petterson whose is lecturer from Boras University in Sweden. She explained to us that in her country the household wet waste from municipal are used as feed in anaerobic digester to make methane gas or biogas. This biogas is used for fueling all buses and trucks that operate in all the country areas. Even, they have already operated some biogas commercial station for private vehicles.

City of Boras

She said that all the waste management system now is created several decades ago between 1980s and 1990s. The process for Swedish Government to introduce this system to all citizens was not an easy one too. She told us that the government have worked very hard to build people awareness to separate their wastes in order to simplify the transport and mechanism feeding waste to the digester. One of the city that has very good waste management system in Sweden is Boras, as you can see at the pictures that show the city image and flow diagram waste management.  She also pointed that the important things that must be concerned by other nations that want to built waste management system are vision, skill, incentive, plan, and action. If we already have all the points, surely we can built strong waste management system that can solve the landfill problems and also maximize usage of the energy that is contained in the waste. Let’s hope and do our parts in order to make Indonesia as green country !

Boras management waste system