There are a number of thermal treatment processes, other than incineration, that can be applied to organic wastes.  These processes involve elevated temperatures, as high as 700OC and may also involve elevated pressures.  The temperatures and pressures applied define the thermal process and include gasification, pyrolysis and hydrothermal carbonization. These two options of temperature and pressure also define the end-products of the process.  These are usually a biochar and an organic rich liquid stream.  The former is an energy rich solid that can utilized as a solid fuel (although a market does not yet exist for this material) or it can be recycled to land where it will trap the organic carbon from the original organic waste, thus eliminating the GHG emissions associated with the landfilling of this material.  By changing the hydrolysis conditions it is also possible to release and capture the phosphorus from the organic material into the char, thus achieving phosphorus recovery.  The organic-rich liquid stream can be anaerobically digested either conventionally with energy recovery in the form of methane, or via a number of more novel routes such as the carboxylate platform, which can deliver high value products such as butyrate, acetone and succinate.   These thermal processes can be applied at a number of points in the flow train.  For instance they can feature ahead of conventional digestion where much of the energy is captured as biochar, with the rest being captured through digestion of the organic rich liquid stream, giving a much reduced volume of digestate for recycling.  Alternatively they can be applied to the digestate itself giving a biochar and an organic rich liquor for recycling back to the digester.  In this way production of digestate is completely eliminated.