Challenges and solutions for food waste-based biogas in Malaysia

This study aims to identify and rank policy options to inform development of an enabling environment for food waste-based biogas production for energy generation in Malaysia, taking into account stakeholder perspectives. The analysis focuses on stakeholders from Malaysia whose responses are analysed using the analytic hierarchy process. Literature searches identified sixteen challenges and twenty-eight solutions, which were analysed under environmental, institutional and legal, economic and resourcing, technical and social and cultural categories. Findings rank the economic and resourcing category highest (28.6 %), followed by the institutional and legal category (26.1 %), social and cultural (21.6 %), technical (12.9 %) and then environmental categories (10.9 %). Identifying a good balance between the scale of plant, food waste distribution and collection with a weight of 46.4 % dominates the solutions, followed by constant socialisation with the community to emphasise the importance of shifting from landfilling or incineration to biogas (44.6 %). Implement nationwide operational management standards, optimise operational parameters of the biogas digester, and target major waste producers (i.e., catering enterprises) and enforce waste segregation at source were solutions positioned respectively in third, fourth and fifth position with weights of 22.2 %, 19.9 % and 17.4 %. Substituting fossil fuels with renewable resources such as biogas where possible will reduce climate change alongside other environmentally damaging impacts, and supports progress towards climate action (SDG 13). The output of this study can inform policy development for food waste-based biogas production for energy generation in both Malaysia and globally.