ENHANCING UNIT VALUE REALIZATION OF HAIR SHEEP SKIN- AN ASSESSMENT OF CHANGES BETWEEN BUTT AND BELLY REGIONS AND ITS VALUE ADDITION USING COLLAGEN HYDROLYSATE

Skin will undergo changes in biochemical and biophysical properties during leather processing.
Biochemical composition varies with respect to different regions of the skin like butt, belly,
and neck. Supported with the nature of structure and chemical constituents of the skin, leather
processing chemicals do have different propensity to different parts of the skin. Belly region’s
looseness and substance non-uniformity are the main problem in leather making from sheep
skin (SS) particularly for shoe upper. Having a back with the leather processing practice and
statistical data, an exuberant substance non-uniformity for sheep shoe upper is still recurrent in
our country’s context. To address same issue, this work focusses on the analysis of histology
and biochemical properties of butt and belly portion of hair sheep skin besides the investigation
of application collagen hydrolysate on the value addition of dyed crust leather and emission
load during pre-tanning.
Globular proteins are relatively higher in the butt region than the belly, whereas it is reverse in
the case of fibrous proteins except collagen. Interestingly, the presence of proteoglycans
content in butt regions is significantly high compared to belly and in case of fat it is reverse.
Thus, the effect of liming and bating operations in removing unwanted skin constituents is
stronger in butt and belly regions of SS, respectively, which reflects the requisite importance
of the two unit operations in the pre-tanning operations. ASC contribution is higher in butt
region than belly and the reverse is true in the case of PSC. The overall collagen content is
considerably higher in butt than belly which may be the major cause of the higher strength
characteristics of butt regions. Cr2O3