Approaches to Near Zero Utilization of Water in the Post tanning Operations of Leather Processing
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2014-09
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
AAU
Abstract
Any industrial activity would generate waste, whose form would be as solid,
liquid and/or gas. While industrialization is important to a nation’s economy,
the wellbeing of human kind is even more important. The conflict for water
between mankind consumption and industrial activity is increasing day by day
as the population is increasing. An industrial activity like leather processing is
a water intensive process, with most of the industries consuming 35 L of water
to process every kilogram of hide/skin. While it is easy to wish away an activity
like leather processing, an analysis of the relevance of this industry to Nation
building would reveal that this is the only industry that uses a byproduct of
meat industry, viz., skin and converts it into a fashion commodity. In the
transformation, a host of rural men and women are involved directly or
indirectly. For the nation, it is a good source of export income. This research
work is one of an out-of-the-box thinking of systematic reduction and utilize
known concepts of recycle, reduce or recovery of used water from
processing. For this, the methodology has relied upon the replacement of
water with environmentally benign and clean/green solvent for transporting
chemicals into the skin matrix instead. The work consists of identifying the
appropriate solvent or solvent mixture that a) did not have any adverse effect
on the fibre structure, b) where a significant number of leather auxiliaries
could be dissolved or dispersed and c) could be easily recovered and reused.
The combination of solvents was selected from amongst reported clean/green
solvents and the solubility / stability of the auxiliary dispersions determined by
the measurement of the zeta potential of the system. The initial interaction of the dispersed auxiliaries with skin matrix being one of adsorption, various
models of adsorption can be fitted to understand the nature of binding. The
physical and visual properties of developed leathers have also been
compared.
Description
Keywords
Near Zero Utilization, Water, Post tanning, Leather Processing