Deodorizing and Compacting Waste from Abaca Pulping

Is there some chemical remains left in this waist product that prevents it from being used for compost?

I grew up down wind of a sugar beet processing plant, and they had rotting piles of waist pulp, which also was an unwelcome smell. The beet growers would joke this smells like money. It took years for them to figure out to haul it back out to the fields and used it as compost.

Good question. I don't have a chemical analysis. I'm assuming that any alkali residue has been neutralized, and the fecal odor tells me there are mercaptans present, but I know nothing more than that. I will try composting the stuff. Maybe that's what those taking on the waste are doing with it...

There's more in this paper than I could ever understand. Hope this helps.

It's a good paper, but it's about the useful product of abaca pulping...not the waste. Love the former...but it's the latter I am trying to deal with.

Some of those compounds are awfully smelly, I assumed that the waste product can't be totally free from them so there would be some carryover. Have you done a spectrographic analysis of the waste so you can spot the compounds of interest? Sometimes a digester or fermenter can change those compounds into something less smelly or more useful, again this is way out of my field, I nearly flunked organic chemistry.

I'm afraid I wouldn't know where to find the apparatus to perform a spectrographic analysis, or what to do with it once found, or how to interpret the results. This is an ad hoc effort. My formal training - such as it is - is in mechanical, not chemical engineering.

Ok, so you want something mechanical, try drying it in the sun on some large black sheeting then seeing if the material burns. Don't forget to weigh it before and after to get an idea what the moisture content is.

I would also try composting, fermenting, and digesting it. Composting is easy but not predictable, but there's plenty to Google on for the other two, you might even get methane as a useable by-product.

There are many dairy farms that feed cow pooh into a digester and get methane and fertilizer as output products. Some people take it a step further and turn biomass into ethanol or biodiesel.

The Philippines seems to have many organizations devoted to using the existing biomass, maybe you can contact them. Just do your own research to make sure that there still something useful left in all that waste, you don't want to find out later that it's all ash and no fuel.

Drying it is something I very much want to do - it's the first essential step in really learning what's in there. Unfortunately, the stuff stinks so badly that my neighbors will be in full revolt if I don't solve the stink problem first.

One of the bizarre schemes I'm trying to work on right now is using ozone to deodorize the air leaving a solar dryer that would be a slightly more sophisticated version of the black polyethylene sheet that you suggest. There is late nineteenth century, early twentieth work that suggests that a very small amount of ozone cancels odor from sewage treatment ponds, and that is very much the nature of this stuff. I need to gin up an improvised ozone generator to test that.

One thing I do know from the source is that this stuff is biologically active, so direct composting is well worth trying as well, as suggested earlier. I've taken one crude step toward that by burying a small amount of the stuff (the excess of my "sample") in the garden with wood ash and some kitchen waste. The main purpose was to hide the odor, but I will definitely dig it up again later to see how it has evolved.

Anaerobic digestion in slurry form does need to be tried, too, though that takes a bit more apparatus.