Composting equipment design and technology for rural refuse disposal

The environmental risk caused by the rural refuse increasingly is proved to be a big issue because there is not enough place for landfill. A new kind of composting equipment and technology was studied for dealing with such a problem in this paper. The composting equipment, which is composed of 4 bins with 1.56 m3 volume of each bin, was tested for 2 months at the municipal solid waste transfer station at Mengyong village, Panyu district in Guangzhou. The power of exhaust fan was 1.1 kW/h, the operation frequency was 10 times per day, 30 minutes per time, so the total operation time was 5 hours a day, the energy cost of the whole compost was 5.5kW. Through 12 days of high temperature fermentation followed by 24 days of bag fermentation, the temperature could be up to 60℃ for at least 5 days, the volume reduction rate of the rural refuse could reach up to 40% after 12 days, and there was no secondary pollution in the whole compost. The results showed that the composting equipment and technology was a feasible way to realize quantitative reduction, harmlessness and resources recovery of the rural refuse.