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ABSTRACT
In a market where footwear quality involves both health improvement and a better environmental protection, "environmentally-friendly footwear" that minimizes environmental and health impact, guaranteeing a certain level of quality, may fulfill the requirements of today's consumer. Throughout their life cycle, from leather processing to the finished footwear, resulting waste and chemicals contained in some of the products may be harmful for health and the environment. In accordance to European law, waste from the leather and footwear industry must be recovered by reuse, recycling, energy recovery, exploitation by chemical and biochemical degradation, by recovering useful organic compounds. One of the possibilities to recover solid waste with low costs is biodegradation. The purpose of this paper is to comparatively study biodegradation under aerobic conditions in liquid medium of three types of materials used in the leather and footwear industry, namely: chrome tanned leather, leather tanned with vegetable compounds, and leather substitute. The biodegradability study was conducted in accordance with SR EN 13432/02 in a waste biodegradation plant in liquid medium under aerobic conditions (SR EN ISO 14852-05). To characterize the biodegradation process, the following were monitored for 100 days: conductivity, total organic carbon (TOC) content, total organic nitrogen (TON) content, and waste biodegradation degree.
Keywords: biodegradation, chrome-tanned leather, vegetable-tanned leather, synthetic leather
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INTRODUCTION
The revised Ecolabel awarding criteria aim particularly at promoting sustainable products with low environmental impact, especially in terms of natural resource depletion, water, air and soil emissions from manufacturing processes, contributing to the environmental dimension of sustainable development throughout their life cycle as well as to limiting the presence of hazardous substances [1].
According to European legislation, waste resulting from the leather and footwear industry must be recovered by means of the same methods: reuse, recycling, energy recovery, recovery by chemical and biochemical degradation, reclaiming useful organic compounds [2-4].
One possibility of recovering solid waste from the leather industry with low costs, is biodegradation [5].
As leather processing requires tanning materials to convert a putrescible material (hide or skin) into a durable material (leather), the literature shows many concerns in terms of studying aerobic and anaerobic biodegradation to remove leather waste and used footwear from the environment. [6-10].
As a result, this paper comparatively studies biodegradation under...