title: Biodegradability of leathers through anaerobic pathway.
abstract: Leather processing generates huge amounts of both solid and liquid wastes. The management of solid wastes, especially tanned leather waste, is a challenging problem faced by tanners. Hence, studies on biodegradability of leather become imperative. In this present work, biodegradability of untanned, chrome tanned and vegetable tanned leather under anaerobic conditions has been addressed. Two different sources of anaerobes have been used for this purpose. The effect of detanning as a pretreatment method before subjecting the leather to biodegradation has also been studied. It has been found that vegetable tanned leather leads to more gas production than chrome tanned leather. Mixed anaerobic isolates when employed as an inoculum are able to degrade the soluble organics of vegetable tanned material and thus exhibit an increased level of gas production during the initial days, compared to the results of the treatments that received the anaerobic sludge. With chrome tanned materials, there was not much change in the volume of the gas produced from the two different sources. It has been found that detanning tends to improve the biodegradability of both types of leathers.
authors.affiliation: Chemical Laboratory, Central Leather Research Institute, Adyar, Chennai 600 020, India.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Dhayalan
authors.forename: N Nishad
authors.initials: NN
authors.lastname: Fathima
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gnanamani
authors.forename: J Raghava
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Rao
authors.forename: B Unni
authors.initials: BU
authors.lastname: Nair
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ramasami
mesh_terms: D000693:Anaerobiosis; D001673:Biodegradation, Environmental; D019149:Bioreactors; D007220:Industrial Waste; D034582:Integumentary System; D012037:Refuse Disposal / Q000379:methods*; D013633:Tanning
chemical_list: D007220:Industrial Waste