Hydrothermal carbonization for wet wastes management

Hydrothermal carbonization represents an effective process to transform high moisture wastes into hydrochar, a solid substrate that can be used as soil improver. As a matter of fact, hydrochar presents many characteristics that are in good agreement with the standards internationally required for the utilization of solid substrates in the soil. In this work, the possibility to apply hydrothermal carbonization to an usually landfilled fraction of waste, the off-specification compost (EWC 19.05.03), was studied. The preliminary results here reported sustain the real possibility to apply this thermochemical process as a viable alternative to the common management of the EWC 19.05.03 waste fraction.