Hala I. Chaoui |
PhD Research |
One of my research goals was to provide the waste recycling industry with radical innovations to finally make it socially acceptable and environmentally safe; clean waste recycling is possible. My future research goal is to demonstrate that plants grown organically can be reliable components of engineered systems. As to waste recycling, as the manager of the US Composting Council’s Seal of Testing Assurance Program once said, the waste processing industry is striated, with advanced composting systems on top and at the bottom ‘people who just pile it up’. The people on top can keep raising the bar and pull the others along with them. My goal is to help in raising the standards for the waste recycling industry by researching and developing alternative waste processing techniques. My focus in my PhD research was the bioprocessing of organic materials, in particular through earthworms, and optimizing the engineering design for this process. Earthworms have been shown to increase the rate at which organic waste is biodegraded and also the rate of nutrient mineralization in the final product compared to the raw material. The resulting product, earthworm casts, is low in pathogens, odorless, relatively dry and rich in plant nutrients. In my current research I am modeling the effectiveness of an electric field at repelling earthworms, for the purpose of separating them from the processed waste. Once incorporated in bioprocessing systems this technology could potentially optimize waste recycling by earthworms.
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