Research Projects

Objective: To evaluate the organic product possessing dual functionality such as preserving the hides/skins and loosening of hair simultaneously at pilot scale; To carry out commercial scale validation of the technology; To carryout Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of the process/Product

Summary: Globally, salt based preservation technique and lime/sulfide based unhairing process is widely emplyoyed. The generation of huge quantity of contaminated salt, wastewater with high TDS load, lime sludge and liveration of H2S gas are the major drawbacks of the conventional preservation and unhairing processes. In addition to that rehydration is a pre- requisite for salted hides/skin before unhairing, which generates approximately 8-10 L of wastewater/kg of raw hides/skins with high TDS load. This necessitates the tanner to adopt sophisticated system like reverse osmosis to treat the soak liquor, which increases the end-of-pipe treatment cost. Therefore, in this project, it is proposed to evaluate an organic product formulation for both preservation and unhairing process without employing salt, lime and sodium sulfide. The formulation will be employed for both hide and skin and the process parameters will be optimized. Efforts will be dedicated to transfer the obtained technology for commercialization.