The Circular and Green Economy principles is inspiring new approaches to municipal wastewater treatment plants (MWWTPs) design and operation. Recently, an ever-growing interest is devoted to exploring the alternatives for switching the WWTPs from being able to ‘simply’ removing contaminants from water to biorefinery-like plants where energy and material can be recovered. In this perspective, both wastewater and residues from process can be valorised for recovering nutrients (N and P), producing value added products (i.e. biopolymers), energy vectors and biofuels (i.e. bio-H₂, bio-CH₄ and bioethanol). As an additional benefit, changing the approach for WWTPs design and operation will decrease the overall amount of landfilled residues. In this context, the present research is aimed at evaluating the CH₄ production potential of MWW screening units’ residues. While such a stream is typically landfilled, the expected progressive increase of biodegradable matter content due to the ban on single-use plastic along with the boost of bioplastics makes the investigation of different biochemical valorisation routes more and more interesting from an environmental and economical perspective. Thus, a full-scale data collection campaign was performed to gain information on screening residues amount and properties and to analyse the relationship with influent flowrate. The most relevant residue properties were measured, and lab-scale tests were carried out to evaluate the bio-CH₄ potential.

循环和绿色经济原则正在激发城市污水处理厂 (MWWTP) 设计和运营的新方法。最近，越来越多的兴趣致力于探索将污水处理厂从能够“简单”去除水中的污染物转变为可以回收能源和材料的生物精炼厂的替代方案。从这个角度来看，废水和工艺残留物都可以用于回收营养物（N 和 P）、生产增值产品（即生物聚合物）、能源载体和生物燃料（即 bio-H ₂、bio-CH ₄和生物乙醇）。作为一个额外的好处，改变污水处理厂设计和运营的方法将减少填埋残留物的总量。在这种情况下，本研究旨在评估 CH ₄MWW 筛分装置残渣的生产潜力。虽然这样的溪流通常会被填埋，但由于禁止使用一次性塑料以及生物塑料的推广，预计可生物降解物质含量会逐渐增加，这使得从环境和经济角度研究不同的生化增值途径变得越来越有趣。因此，进行了全面的数据收集活动，以获取有关筛选残留量和特性的信息，并分析与进水流量的关系。测量了最相关的残留物特性，并进行了实验室规模的测试以评估 bio-CH ₄的潜力。