Cleaner beam house processes trial on cattle sofa leather

Leather processing has been an important light industry in China, which has contributed a lot to economy. The recent environmental challenges caused tremendous pressure to leather manufacture. The conventional beam house processes employ a wide range of chemicals which result in more than 60% of the total pollution in leather processing (mainly based on COD, BOD, TS, SS, NH₃–N). In this study, cleaner beam house processes were tested on cattle sofa leather to provide a clean environment. A control experiment was run parallel using conventional beam house processes. The results show that the de-hairing is complete through pelt histological microstructure, the extent of opening up of fibre bundles is very good, which is substantiated through chrome distribution analysis, scanning electron microscopic pictures of wet blue leathers and the analysis of contents of total proteins, polysaccharide and hydroxyproline in composite liquor, and the performance of the leathers is shown to be satisfied with the quality standard of sofa leather. The results from composite water analysis show that the cleaner processes enjoy in the reduction of emission water, chemical oxygen demand, total solids and ammonia-nitrogen loads by 46%, 93%, 58% and 54%, respectively, compared to the conventional processes. The total dry sludge from the clean processes is almost eliminated, and the composite cost is decreased by 10%.