Preface

The exponential growth of the global population and concurrent fast industrialization has led to the massive generation of municipal wastes, raising challenges of safe disposal. The proper management of municipal wastes through recycling is an essential approach for global sustainable development. So far, many countries have established regulatory guidelines for different waste management routes and pollution control measures. However, most of the applied routes are waste dumping, composting, or direct discharge into water bodies without adequate pretreatment, which seriously threatens the environment and humans. Thus, proper waste segregation and separation provide an efficient option for waste conversion into energy. On the other hand, energy demand correlates with population growth. Thus, global energy demand and environmental pollution are two inevitable issues that dictate the need to find alternative energy sources. Waste-to-energy is a widely used process for efficient waste management that is attracting much attention. For almost two decades, biofuel production from biowastes has been of paramount importance. In general, it is widely accepted that biowaste-derived fuels can reduce the current dependence on fossil-based products. Among different biofuel production routes, anaerobic digestion is, by far, the single most important technology for providing clean renewable biogas to millions of people in the rural areas of developing countries. Anaerobic digestion technology has several inherent benefits ranging from generating renewable energy, remediating biowaste and curtailing CO2/CH4 emissions to improving health/hygiene and overall socio-economic status of rural communities in developing nations.

This book is an extension of our previously published book entitled *Biogas - Recent Advances and Integrated Approaches*. It provides new integrated approaches and case studies on biogas production. The book is divided into two main sections. The first section discusses the basics of biogas production from different feedstocks and the role of the microbial community, with the possible utilization of anaerobic digestate as a biofertilizer. The second section includes case studies and discusses the economic feasibility of biogas production from municipal waste.

We would like to express our gratitude to all the contributing authors. We also wish to thank the author service managers at IntechOpen for being generously helpful throughout the publication.

> **Abd El-Fatah Abomohra** Chengdu University, Chengdu, China

> > **El-Sayed Salama** Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China

Section 1
