What are the advantages of a bioreactor?

The Bioreactor technology significantly reduces the time required for the decomposition of waste. It provides for rapid stabilisation of the waste and reduces its period of potential risk to the surrounding environment to within 5 - 10 years and produces 10 - 15% better settlement rates. This period is significantly shorter than the decomposition period required by traditional landfills to stabilise waste.

Although some landfills have been converted to behave like bioreactors by retrofitting technology, a bioreactor is a vastly different facility to a traditional landfill. Traditional landfills – or ‘dry tomb’ landfills – can typically take several hundred years or more before the waste is stabilised, as the waste is heavily compacted and covered daily to prevent rainfall infiltration. Consequently, moisture is unable to reach the waste to facilitate decomposition.

As a result of the accelerated decomposition of the waste in a bioreactor, the production of bio gas also occurs within a shorter period of time. Although the quantity of gas produced in a bioreactor is theoretically comparable to the amount produced at a landfill, its generation over a much shorter period of time makes green energy production a viable environmental and commercial pursuit.

The treatment process within a bioreactor is considered to be more similar to an anaerobic digestor than a traditionall landfill. A bioreactor is a form of specialised in situ treatment that relies on the naturally occuring anaerobic digestion process. In contrast, a traditional landfill attempts to inhibit this process by excluding moisture from the system through heavy compaction and internal barrier layers throughout the landfill. An anaerobic digestor has limitied flexibility as it can only cater for organic input streams, rather than a residual solid waste stream that can be received at a bioreactor.