STUDIES ON DEVELOPMENT OF CLEANER BEAMHOUSE PROCESS, EXTRACTION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF COLLAGEN FROM FLESHING WASTES

The study presents the development of cleaner beamhouse processes to facilitate the extraction of collagen from fleshing waste. 0.8% offer level of alkali protease in soaking process is observed to be optimum for opening up the fibre texture of the hide, and to provide good yield of fleshing waste. In addition to this, complete removal of hair is still an issue of concern for unhairing using enzymes. CLRI had developed a novel protease for unhairing and the effectiveness of this protease for unhairing in the presence of lipase as co-enzymes was study and presented in this thesis. Experimental results indicated that 1% lipase followed by 4% protease treatment improved the unhairing efficacy. The enzymatically dehaired hide was further analyse by SEM, and the complete removal of hair in the experimental process (1% lipase followed by 4% protease) is further established. The reduction in pollution load parameters viz., BOD, COD, TOC, TDS and TSS is 89.375%, 88.57%, 85.79%, 47.37% and 48.57%, respectively with reference to conventional unhairing process. The leathers processed from optimized soaking and unhairing system showed comparable strength characteristics with reference to leather processed with chemical unhairing system. Hence a total bio-based beamhouse processing in leather manufacture was feasible. Fleshing from conventional lime and green fleshing wastes were used for the extraction of collagen, which is high value protein that can be used for a wide range of applications viz., tissue engineering, cosmetic, food, and wound healing and pharmacy application.