DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTEGRATED WET FINISHING PROCESS: MANUFACTURE OF GARMENT LEATHERS

摘要

In recent years, tanners have been showing interest in adopting several clean technologies due to increasing public pressure against the tanning activity because of the environmental damage. Tanning activity also engaged in huge consumption of water, power, chemicals and labor. A compact wet finishing process has been developed for making garment leathers. The process provides leathers having comparable or even better physical and bulk properties to that derived from conventional wet finishing process. Especially, color and softness of the processed leathers are much improved, which are substantiated through reflectance, color, and softness measurements. This has been attributed to the improved uptake of dyes, fatliquors and chromium through an integrated wet finishing process. This is also supported by the reduced pollution loads such as COD, TS and chromium loads redueced by 23, 30 and 50%, respectively. Importantly, the water consumption is reduced by 73% for processing 1 metric ton of wet blue shaved leathers, which is one of the pioneering achievements. Techno-economic viability study indicates that the integrated process is commercially viable.