Data of metal and microbial analyses from anaerobic co-digestion of organic and mineral wastes

Abstract

High concentrations of minerals, heavy metals are often found in mineral wastes (MWs) originated from municipal solid waste incineration plants, so as construction/demolition sites. Such by-products (minerals) often have buffering capacity. The current work provides analysis of total and soluble (dissolved) metal concentrations released by four different MWs (a. cement-based waste, b. incineration (bottom), c. fly and d. boiler ash) supplemented to anaerobic reactors of organic waste at 37 °C. The reactors (continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR)) were ran for 75 days at hydrolytic retention time of 20 days. Genomic DNA extraction, and qPCR and Illumina HiSeq (16S V4) analyses were conducted to investigate microbial community population and composition in anaerobic digestate samples collected from these reactors. Output data from Illumina sequencing analysis were FastQ files analysed using the QIIME2 pipeline to produce a feature table listing the frequency of each assigned microbial taxa per samples. Additional study was conducted on the microbial data to visualise variations in microbial communities using the STAMP software and phyloseq R package. Detailed interpretation and discussion of the results can be found in the related research article [1].

Fig. 1

Total and dissolved metal concentrations in the reactor digestates on day 75 measured according to EPA method 3010A using ICP-OES machine. ‘Total’ is total metal concentrations, ‘Dissolved’ is dissolved (soluble) metal concentrations. CO = control reactor, IBA = incineration bottom ash, FA = fly ash, BA = boiler ash, CBW = cement-based waste. ‘L’ and ‘D’ refer to the reactors feeding method ‘liquid-recycled feeding method’ and ‘draw-and-fill feeding method’ respectively .

Fig. 2

Principle component analysis of bacterial (A) and archaeal (B) communities of digestate samples collected from anaerobic reactors on days 0, 20 and 75, plots generated using STAMP software . For details of the legend labels see Fig. 1.

Fig. 3

Alpha diversity metrics of microbial communities of digestate samples collected from different anaerobic reactors on days 0, 20 and 75, plots generated using phyloseq R package . For details of the legend labels see Fig. 1.

Fig. 4

Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) diagrams of archaeal communities (the 10 highest archaeal taxa) as determined by 16S rRNA using Vegan package . Arrows indicated the direction of increasing values with the length of the arrows correlated with the percentage of community composition data accounted for by that variable. (A) Measured and calculated parameters on day 75, (B) Soluble metal concentrations combined in three groups trace (TE) metals, heavy metals and alkali (Alk) metals and (C) individual soluble metal concentrations measured .