The tannery industry converts rawhide or skin into leather and finishes it so that it can be used in the manufacture of a wide range of consumer products. While it uses less water than the textile industry, it still uses 12 to 37 liters per kilogram of hide and produces highly complex wastewater with high concentrations of organic pollutants (an average of 19 kg of carbon per ton of rawhide) and toxic and persistent substances. The tannery wastewater is complex, potentially toxic, difficult to treat, and contains high levels of suspended matter, organics, N compounds, sulfates, chromium, and salts.

Since the tannery industry has a significant negative impact on the environment, more stringent regulations are being put in place, requiring intensive and efficient treatment before disposing of the waste into municipal sewer or water bodies.

For dealing with Tannery wastewater presenting significant organic loads, the bioprocess is usually the core of the process. However, the increasingly stringent discharge restrictions and complexity of tannery effluents necessitate more innovative and efficient solutions.

HALBR is one of the best available technologies, being the core of the biological treatment for removing organic and nitrogen-based pollutants. This technology effectively deals with the two main challenges of tannery wastewater:

• Removal of slowly biodegradable or recalcitrant compounds

• Efficient treatment under potential toxic shock loads

EauTech Solutions supplies turnkey packages for tannery companies worldwide, combining HALBR technology with pre-treatment and reuse technologies.For each project’s requirement, the patented HALBR can be easily coupled with certain complementary processes to achieve the required effluent quality with the highest cost competitiveness.

The HALBR technology is typically installed after the physical-chemical pretreatment for metal removal (e.g. chromium). A subsequent reverse osmosis (RO) stage can be also applied after the HALBR for salt removal in the case that zero liquid discharge (ZLD) is addressed for water reuse within the tannery process.