Industrial Waste Management: The Case of the Tannery Industry

120 000 t/y of dry sludges are produced as a result of the precipitation techniques commonly applied for metals control in the 40 Mm3/y of wastewaters discharged by the tannery industry in Italy. Different approaches for tannery waste management, based on “conservative environmental technologies”, are proposed in the paper, together with a comparative cost-benefit evaluation. Details on a demonstration campaign run using an ion exchange pilot plant (10 m3/d) at a real installation are also given in the paper.