My research activity related to digestate valorization, oil industrial and organic waste utilization and soil remediation (after oil spills, heavy metals contamination etc.) has a multidiscipline character within Environment Sciences, Ecological Engineering and Agricultural Sciences Area’s.
At the beginning of my professional career I was focused on oil drilling waste, technological setup for its utilization and remediation techniques for soil restoration after oil spills. Surprisingly, I came up with relevant solution starting work with biogas and digestate research.
Recent studies showed that digestate applied as biofertilizer has a potential to improve soil structure, physical properties, increase water infiltration and retention, nutrient bioavailability due to soil organic matter decomposition, and soil cation exchange capacity. Digestates are usually used as organic fertilizers due to the presence of high contents of plant nutrients and usually have very good fertilizing properties. Therefore, biogas digestate turns to be a good candidate to replace inorganic fertilizers and soil improvers.
My previous research indicated a long-term effect of digestate addition on soil carbon accumulation. These results are very important in terms of digestate potential for soil carbon storage and role of soils in climate change mitigation due to carbon sequestration and humification.
Another research direction is related to positive effect from digestate application as biofertilizer and soil amendment. Digestate has a potential for bioremediation of soils polluted with organic and inorganic chemicals through the binding of heavy metals with digestate organic matter and digestate biostimulation effect on petroleum hydrocarbon degradation.
Currently I am involved in research focusing on the digestate granulation that has the potential to solve problems with nutrients and pollutant content in fertilizer and provide long-term positive effect of nutrient release in soil.
