Use of different pre-treated chromium leather shavings to produce biogas in continuous scale

Content: Leather goods are noble and sustainable but leather production may bear a potential for pollution. During leather manufacture high amounts of chromium shavings, wet by-products of the leather industry, are produced worldwide. Due to their chromium content they are disposed in landfill sites worldwide leading to long lasting environmental problems. They are stable towards temperatures of up to 110 °C and enzymatic degradation, preventing anaerobic digestion in a biogas plant. This stability is due to the three-dimensional native structure, typical for collagen, and additional chemical cross-links between the collagen fibers achieved by Cr3+ salts in the tanning step in tanneries. Therefore, hitherto chromium shavings are not utilized industrially to produce biogas. In order to ease enzymatic degradation, necessary to produce biogas, a previous denaturation of the native structure has to be carried out. Otherwise, the generation of biogas is hindered. In our projects, shavings were pre-treated thermally and mechanically by extrusion and hydrothermal methods. In previous works, we studied intensively the use of these shavings to produce biogas in batch scale and significant improvement was reached when using pre-treated shavings. In this work, a scale-up of the process was performed in a continuous reactor using pre-treated and untreated shavings to examine the feasibility of the considered method. Measuring different parameters along the anaerobic digestion, namely organic matter and volatile fatty acids content, it was possible to show that a higher loading rate can be used when feeding the reactor with pre-treated shavings instead of untreated shavings, which means a more economical process in an industrial scenario. Take-Away: The use of a pre-treatment improves the biogas production from chromium shaving