Life goast green organic agents for sustainable tanneries

LIFE GOAST Green Organic Agents for Sustainable Tanneries (LIFE ENV/IT/000416) belongs to European LIFE programme which supports and promotes the research and innovation on environmental and sustainability topics. The project started on July 2017 and is an ongoing investigation, and involves the competences of three direct actors in the leather industry such as GSC Group spa as chemical supplier, Conceria Pasubio as tannery and Mediochiampo as waste-water treatment agency, in conjunction with the expertise of Università 'Ca Foscari di Venezia. It aims at demonstrating the benefits of a new tanning technology on a semi-industrial scale, particularly focusing at the tanning stage of the leather manufacture, and put itself as a more sustainable alternative to Traditional Chrome Tanning Process (TCTP). The technical feasibility of LIFE GOAST implementation, as well as its social and economic impact, have been monitored and compared with the TCTP in order to demonstrate the reduced environmental impacts of the new process, while producing comparable or better quality leather. It was then demonstrated that it was possible to treat collagen with the GOAST technology to give stabilised collagen to be used in the leather industry. A series of leather swatches were realised according to the new protocol in order to obtain preliminary information on chemical oxygen demand COD of the effluents and technical feasibility of the process. The results were remarkable: the collected waste-water generated from tanning and retanning showed COD values in line with TCTP and it was possible to obtain soft and firm grain leather despite a shrinkage temperature lower than chromium process