Waste not, want not

Published in 2009

An Associate Laureate of the 1998 Rolex Awards, Karel Kolomaznik was selected for his ambitious plan to develop industrial processes to recover and recycle potentially toxic waste from the leather industry. Professor Kolomaznik achieved that goal and now has another even more common form of waste in his sights.

Karel Kolomaznik is not a household name in his native country, the Czech Republic, let alone worldwide. But he should be. At least this chemical engineer and professor at Tomas Bata University, who has developed solutions to deal with the huge quantities of waste from leather production, has gained recognition from his peers.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been enthusiastically sharing research results with him since the early 1980s, when he won a scholarship to study in Philadelphia. In 2001, the American Biographical Institute named him as one of the “1,000 World Leaders of Scientific Influence”. Leather companies from Argentina to India have paid him the highest compliment they can – they have copied his methods of dealing with waste, generally without paying Kolomaznik or his university a fee – but the Czech scientist is happy for his methods to be used and for the environment to be spared some of the potentially noxious waste that the production of leather entails.

Test image alt desc ©Rolex Awards/Stefan Walter

Working with just a handful of young researchers and doctoral students at Tomas Bata University in Zlin, an industrial city in the eastern part of the Czech Republic, this modest engineer says he was drawn to chemistry in his youth by a boyhood love of “fire and explosions”. His move to Zlin in 1970 was a turning point in his career. Once a small village, Zlin became a burgeoning city and industrial centre in the early 20th century after Tomas Bata, perhaps the nation’s most famous entrepreneur, set up a shoe factory there. In his new location, Kolomaznik naturally focused his research on waste from the leather industry.

Thirty-eight years later, it is still of great interest to him, even though in the past 10 years leather production has largely moved out of Zlin to Asia, where manufacturing costs are cheaper and regulations less strict.

The tanning of hides to make leather is one of the world’s oldest industries – it’s recorded in 5,000-year-old Egyptian tomb paintings – and leather production has played a vital part in the development of industry over the centuries. Without treatment, animal skins shrink and putrefy, so tanning is a key process for the preparation of products that have long been omnipresent in all advanced civilisations – from footwear to accessories to durable seat coverings in cars, buses and trains, as well as numerous sporting and industrial uses.

Test image alt desc©Rolex Awards/Stefan Walter

The leather industry got a major boost in 1858 when the process of tanning using a compound of chromium – chromium III – was discovered, by far the most efficient process of tanning. Chromium III is harmless, but when the leather shavings from tanneries are dumped and subjected to phenomena such as spontaneous oxidation by, for example, acid rain, the traces of chromium III become chromium VI, which is highly toxic and carcinogenic, posing a risk to water supplies.

The waste from leather production is enormous. Processing one tonne of raw hide produces 200 kilograms of leather product, 250kg of non-tanned solid waste, 200kg of tanned waste (containing 3kg of chromium) and 50,000kg of waste water (containing 5kg of chromium).

From the 1990s onwards, Kolomaznik and fellow researchers have been finding technological solutions to dealing with this waste. In 1996 they made breakthroughs in discovering ways to deal with solid waste, and from 2003 onwards they successfully calculated ways to use liquid waste.

Test image alt desc©Rolex Awards/Stefan Walter

All the Associate Laureate’s research is based on the idea that there is no such thing as “waste” – almost everything can be recycled and used in some positive way. “The term ‘waste’ is very relative,” he says. “If a successful utilization of waste is to be found, then a change in the philosophy of how we look at things is needed, for the waste of one industry may be valuable raw material for another.”

As he points out, leather is the perfect example. Most hides and skins are a by-product or waste from the meat industry, the primary use, for example, of cattle. Ironically, as a commercial product, leather can, weight for weight, be far more valuable than the meat for which the animal was primarily raised.

The Czech scientist has applied the principle of using waste to all aspects of leather production, not only recovering chromium for reuse – and sparing the environment the risk of contamination from chromium VI – but also creating a whole range of other products from the waste, from material to make sausage casings to glues for the wood industry and gelatine additives for food for animals. A current field of research for Kolomaznik and his colleagues is the creation, from tanning waste, of bio-stimulators for agriculture – biostimulators boost plant immunity against insects, thus reducing the need for insecticides.

Kolomaznik’s research, whether in the leather industry or others, is always aimed at finding practical solutions to the problems of waste. “He is the key expert for developing zero-waste and clean technology,” says Jaromir Ludvik, environmental manager for TOMA a.s., a major energy and waste company in Zlin. The company is using some of the technology developed by Kolomaznik and his colleagues, and, in turn, the professor’s doctoral students can visit the company’s factories for their research. Ludvik cites an example of one process used at the factory to treat the left-overs of animal bones – the resulting material is put to a huge range of uses from additives to detergents or animal food to products that are used to detoxify poisonous gases like sarin gas. “Using these methods here at the TOMA factory, we extract material for re-use from one metric tonne of waste – and the final amount of waste left after we have extracted everything is 200 grammes,” Ludvik declares with obvious pride.

Test image alt desc©Rolex Awards/Stefan Walter

The success and efficiency of the processes developed by Kolomaznik stem from his academic method of examining industrial processes. “Mathematical modelling”, by which chemical reactions of a particular process are analysed on a computer, allows him and his colleagues to adjust quantities, energy use and timing of processes to get the best possible use in terms of cost, production and recycling. Often the individual stages of these industrial processes have already been developed and are well known – but by looking at them analytically as an overall process, Kolomaznik’s method “optimizes” them, often producing a far more efficient, cheaper and eco-friendly result.

One of his researchers, doctoral student Michaela Barinova, says that while her mentor’s methods are “scientific and logical, there is a sort of miracle to it. It requires a special way of thinking, and it’s very much an engineer’s way of thinking, describing a chemical process in a mathematical way so it can be applied and controlled in industry. The genius of Professor Kolomaznik is that he can just see the entire process in his head. There are few scientists who can do that, chemical engineering is a complex and brain-intensive area.”

For the leather industry, in particular, his method of developing processes on the computer and in the laboratory constituted a radical change. Previously, processes were simply developed in the factory, by trial and error. This was in fact how chromium III came into use.

Test image alt desc©Rolex Awards/Stefan Walter

This form of analysis has made Prof. Kolomaznik a world-class leader in chemical engineering. But, despite his international status in his profession, other chemical engineers and doctoral students in his discipline are not beating a path to his door in the university’s Faculty of Applied Informatics. He puts this down to the complex nature of his methods that require advanced skills in engineering, chemistry and mathematics. And to the fact that his work requires long attendance in factories afterwards to verify the results. “Students aren’t interested in going to factories now, they just want to work with databases,” he points out.

However, the newest project on his list of activities will, if successful, certainly draw interest from both academics and industrialists. He and his researchers are focusing on ways to turn used vegetable and animal fats, as well as discarded fat from the tanning of leather, into biodiesel – which can be used to power vehicles and could eventually replace the use of petroleum. “Trap grease” – the used cooking fat discarded by restaurants and householders is a troublesome waste that can cause major problems for municipal authorities that need to find ways to remove it from sewers before it congeals. Other projects are already under way elsewhere to turn this grease into biodiesel. Kolomaznik and his team, working with the BLC Leather Technology Centre, Northampton, U.K., are requesting funding from the European Union to find a much more efficient and economical way to produce biodiesel by “optimizing” the process. Like the Czech professor’s other projects, this would convert a waste into a beneficial material. If funds are given to the project, a pilot factory would be built within the next few years, and licences then issued in various countries for the process to be put in place.

He is confident that if funding is available, the project will succeed thanks to mathematical modelling. “There is no chromium in the process,” he says in a way that implies that this one will be relatively easy.

But he has not forgotten the leather industry. In an article to be published in the near future in a specialized journal, Kolomaznik and other researches draw attention to the possibility that the chromium content in shoes manufactured in countries where production is not controlled strictly enough could, again through the process of oxidisation producing chromium VI, be causing cancer in the kidney or urinary tract of the wearers. Research suggests that there may be a correspondence between rising levels of shoe imports in the Czech Republic and the U.S. and rising levels of cancer in the renal pelvis and the kidney. “… the growth is two to three times higher in women than men,” the Czech professor and his colleagues state in the article. “One of the possible explanations might be the fact that women use socks 10 times less often, while socks act as a barrier against the sorption of trace amount of hexavalent chromium from leather by the skin surface.”

Kolomaznik is proud to be the only Czech to have won a Rolex Award and says that his 1998 prize boosted his reputation and helped him attract funding for his projects. As he and his researchers find new ways of turning waste into resources for mankind, he may yet become a household name.

Edmund Doogue

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