This study was undertaken to determine the possible changes in the digester yield and performance for the anaerobic co-digestion under mesophilic conditions of strawberry residues (SRs) together with pig manure (PM). The first part of this paper deals with the digestion of SR as a single substrate. For organic loading rates (OLRs) of 4.4 (g L-1 d-1) or less, the experimental specific biogas and methane productions are 0.588 and 0.231 L g-1, respectively. When higher OLRs (5.5 g L-1 d-1) are used the digester fails due to acidification. In the second part, the co-digestion of both residues is explored using a wide variety of SR:PM ratios and OLRs of 5.5 g L-1 d-1 with good stability. Therefore, it is demonstrated that co-digestion allows the improvement of the treatment capacity as compared with SR as a single residue. The methane and biogas productions increase as the SR:PM ratio increases. It may be concluded that, when a digester works with a certain OLR, the performance for co-digestion is always better than for single substrates because the presence of PM provides a better stability and the presence of SR improves the biogas and methane production.
Keywords: Farm wastes; organic loading rate; pig manure; resource recovery; strawberry residue; waste valorization.