Valorization of agitated thin film dryer (ATFD)-mixed-salt from textile wastewater for its application in leather manufacturing – a sustainable approach

The textile industry uses sodium chloride and sodium sulphate during the dyeing process to improve the fixation of dyes on fabrics. After wastewater treatment, the reject stream is dried resulting in mixed salts as solid wastes that are not reused. The leather industry also uses a vast quantity of salt for temporary preservation of skins/hides and as swelling-suppressing agent during the pickling (acidification) process. Thus, an attempt was made to utilize the mixed salt obtained from the textile industry to replace sodium chloride in leather processing. It was found that a 40% w/w offer of ATFD salt was able to preserve the skins for 3 months, which was on par with the preservation carried out using a similar quantity of sodium chloride in conventional preservation process. Likewise, for the pickling process, an offer of 10% w/w ATFD salt provided sufficient deswelling action when compared to conventionally used sodium chloride. However, the residual colour of the mixed salts affected the quality of the leather obtained. To overcome this, an electro-oxidation treatment was carried out to obtain decolourized salts. The COD measurements showed that the 1% solution of ATFD-3 salt reduced from 471 ± 25 to 88 ± 16 ppm. A similar trend was also seen in BOD reduction from 80 ± 12 to 18 ± 10 ppm. These results confirmed that the colour removal could be due to the degradation of the organic contaminants present in the ATFD salt. Thus, the treated ATFD salt can be reused for leather processing without affecting leather quality, thus promoting the concept of circular economy.