Oral · Pages 218–223
Abstract
Research summary supplied by the authors
It is estimated that leather processing produces 200 times more waste than total product output thus negatively impacting in the environment. 1 Waste from tannery industries are solids or liquids. While liquid waste management has been widely and successfully explored with several good practices already applied in industrial scale, 2 solid wastes are usually used to produce fertilizers, gelatin, biogas and other products that actually found a limited practical application beyond academic speculations.1 In our very innovative ongoing project, we are focusing our attention on solid wastes from both traditional and vegetal tanned leather with a particular attention to split offcut, shaving and leather dust materials with the idea to use them for the production of high valuable products and catalysts with no further waste production. Starting from vegetable tanned leather split offcuts, tannins were fi rstly extracted by using sustainable solvents to be evaluated for their antioxidant activity for a possible application in cosmetic. The residual biomass and leather offcuts from Cr based tanning have been micronized with different techniques (i.e. ball mill, mixer) and evaluated as additives for the microwave-assisted hydroformylation 3-4 of allylbenzene in water. Preliminary results show that micronized leather samples differently impact in the regioselectivity and effi ciency of the overall process. Tuning the reaction conditions is possible to selectively obtain the linear aldehyde or alcohol depending on the reaction temperature and on the water/leather ratio. The catalyst and the leather can be recovered and reused several times without affecting reaction yields.