Biodiesel not a dirty word says Czech boffins getting the go from goo

  • 9 years ago
Czech scientists from Tomas Bata University have developed a process that converts highly toxic tannery waste into what they say is a cheaper, cleaner form of biofuel than that currently on the market.

Instead of using the pure vegetable oils or fats currently used to produce biofuel they found their answer in a tannery, where fleshings, a leftover fat from leather production, are in plentiful supply. According to researchers, fleshings, a grey sludge-like substance, contain all the ingredients for biodiesel.

“The principle is to remove glycerin from the fat, replace the glycerin with simple methyl alcohol and then proceed to separate glycerin from diesel and in our case also to separate the protein that the fleshings contain for further use,” says Tomas Bata University’s Prof. Karel Kolomaznik.

Fleshings high levels of proteins and free fatty acids, long and costly to remove have ruled out their biofuel use previously.

The Czechs achieved this by melting down the leftover fat