Turning tanning sludge, which is currently a cost, into a circular resource through an anaerobic digestion process: that’s the goal of researchers from the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. The work team published three papers on the topic between 2023 and 2024 in prestigious international scientific journals. “More than 50 percent of sludge”, concludes the Giornale di Vicenza, “can be saved from going to the landfill”.
Turning sludge into a resource
The process devised by Venetian researchers promises, to give a new life to tanning sludge under the concept circularity. These could first of all be reused to produce biogas (“15 million cubic meters” for the Arzignano district alone). But there is mor: the anaerobic digestion process would also make it possible to recover “carboxylic fatty acids such as acetic, citric, benzoic and even formic acid“, all useful in industrial processes. These results of the Department of Environmental Science studies are validated by peer review process required for publication in scientific journals. The anaerobic digestion model, the Vicenza newspaper concludes, should now be put to the test on an industrial scale. The goal, meanwhile, is clear: to turn a cost into an advantage, in the name of circularity.
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