Résumé : |
The dehairing of cattle hides generates large quantities of waste that are of environmental concern as they have a large biological and chemical oxygen demand. We had demonstrated that the traditional dehairing agent, sodium sulfide, can be replaced by an oxidative dehairing agent, sodium perborate, thereby reducing the amount of hazardous chemical in the waste stream. The by-product of perborate is borate, however, which is suspected to accelerate the degradation of wooden dehairing drums. In this paper we report the results of a study that uses sodium percarbonate as the dehairing agent. Although oxidatively dehaired hides exhibit a slight resistance to acid dye uptake, leather produced from percarbonate-dehaired hides in all other studied aspects -- shrinkage temperature, chromium uptake, elongation at break, toughness index -- compared favorably to leather from sulfide-dehaired hides. |