Environmental sustainability assessment of a new degreasing formulation for the tanning cycle within leather manufacturing

The degreasing or defatting phase represents one of the most environmentally impacting step comprised in the whole leather manufacturing cycle. Indeed, the chemical compounds conventionally employed during this activity are significantly impacting, mainly as a consequence of their scarce and slow biodegradability. The present work represents a limited part of the European Life+ plus project titled “Environmentally-friendly natural products instead of chemical products in the degreasing phase of the tanning cycle”, which aims at proposing innovative degreasing formulations based on chemical compounds of natural origin. Particularly, newly synthesized lactose derivatives were thought to partially replace ethoxylated alcohols typically employed in commercial products.