Oral · Pages 238–249
Abstract
Research summary supplied by the authors
Recently, global and new EU perspectives are driving the needs for the development of new materials less environmental impacting; besides, the interest in protecting the environment by not only using products made from fossil fuels as raw materials but the utilisation of natural renewable resources has been steadily and rapidly increasing. The leather industry has already embraced such enterprise, and is already committed for the reduction of hazardous chemicals and the utilisation of new and renewable substances for the leather processing. Bio-based derivatives are gaining remarkable importance for the leather processing, thus becoming more and more impacting and effective in the supply chain of the raw materials for leather processing. However, despite such efforts, it is still quite debatable whether such chemicals might perform equally to their actual fossil-fuels counterparts: this investigation showed how bio-based chemicals can eventually replace the fossil-fuels derivatives. In addition, an overall overview of the tanning, retanning and fi nishing processes and the chemicals involved with respect to the bio- based content have been carried out: The investigators focused on the estimation and the measurement of bio-based derivatives contribution to each phase of the leather processing, their application and therefore the assessment of the leather performances. As a result, a correlation between bio-based, fossil contents and the leather performances were established, aiming at demonstrating the possibility of highly quality leather production with less impacting chemicals and therefore a more sustainable process.