皮革行业绿色高质量发展前沿研究进展OA

Significance The leather industry is a key light-industry sector in China that offers strong international competitiveness.While this sector repur-poses by-products from animal husbandry and meat processing industries into high-value-added products,aligning with circular economy prin-ciples,conventional leather manufacturing processes still generate environmental pollution,including sulfides,high-salinity wastewater,and heavy metals(e.g.,chromium).Furthermore,in response to green trade barriers,the industry must urgently address issues such as life cycle as-sessment(LCA)of leather products and the promotion and implementation of technologies for reducing pollution and mitigating carbon emis-sions.Consumer demand for eco-friendly,health-conscious,comfortable,and intelligent protective leather products is also growing.To address these major industrial requirements,the authors systematically investigated key bottleneck technologies,making important contributions to the sustainable and high-quality development of China's leather industry. Progress This paper summarizes progress across five primary areas,elucidating the scientific principles and application characteristics of newly developed technologies and analyzing existing challenges and future research prospects.These areas include:1)A"multiscale mass transfer-crosslinking"tanning mechanism was proposed to address the technical bottlenecks in conventional chrome tanning that hinder the leather indus-try's green transition.A polysaccharide-based complex tanning agent has also been developed as a viable alternative to chrome tanning,and a chrome-free tanning-compatible post-tanning system was established that utilizes charge regulation and hydrophilic-hydrophobic balance strate-gies to remarkably improve the overall performance of chrome-free leather.Additionally,a multidimensional ecological evaluation framework that incorporates biodegradability,biotoxicity,and LCA was developed to facilitate the large-scale application of chrome-free eco-leather manu-facturing technologies.Future collaboration between government and industry associations will be essential for promoting incentive policies and accelerating the leather industry's ecological transformation.2)A mass transfer enhancement mechanism centered on electrostatic regulation has been proposed to address key challenges in bio-based leather manufacturing,including slow mass transfer,rapid protease catalysis,and poor pro-cess controllability.By tuning the surface charge of the enzyme system,this mechanism reduced the time required for enzyme penetration by more than 70%.In addition,competitive inhibitors were used to dynamically regulate protease activity,enabling uniform enzymatic reactions across different structural layers of leather.Future research should focus on designing low-cost,environmentally friendly,and broadly applicable inhibitors,and elucidating their migration kinetics and mechanisms of activity regulation to support homogeneous enzymatic reactions across vari-ous leather processing stages.3)A molecular capture technology was developed to mitigate the challenges posed by high salinity and strongly hy-drophilic dissolved pollutants in tannery wastewater,which are difficult to treat effectively using conventional technologies.This technology em-ploys specific capture agents that interact with the hydrophilic functional groups of pollutants,thereby inducing hydrophobic aggregation and pre-cipitation and enabling the efficient removal of dissolved contaminants.It has been applied in multiple fields,including the leather and coal chemical industries,oil and gas extraction,and textile dyeing,and has achieved compliant chromium discharge,facilitated wastewater reuse,and enabled the purification of crystallized salts.Future work should focus on further improving the technology's broad-spectrum applicability and cost-effectiveness to support large-scale implementation.4)The collagen network of natural leather was utilized as a structural platform to ad-dress a key challenge in lightweight wearable radiation shielding:achieving high radiation attenuation efficiency,low secondary radiation,and flexibility and comfort simultaneously.To enable the high-performance functionalization of leather materials,a shielding system for X/γ‒rays and neutrons was constructed by integrating core-shell photon-trapping structures,a gradient-attenuation design,W‒H neutron moderation,and atomi-cally dispersed Gd absorption sites.Future work should prioritize overcoming challenges related to performance uniformity and conducting long-term evaluations of radiation resistance in lightweight wearable shielding leather.Additionally,there is a need to develop lightweight,wearable materials that integrate electromagnetic,photon,and neutron shielding for applications in nuclear energy,deep-space exploration,and medical ra-diation protection.5)A cradle-to-gate system boundary was adopted to conduct an LCA study of leather in China.The results demonstrated that raw hides contribute 60.6%‒ 96.0%of leather's total carbon footprint.To facilitate carbon accounting for major leather-making processes and comparative analyses of carbon emissions across different technologies,a domestic LCA database was established for key leather chemicals,in-cluding enzymes,tanning agents,and fatliquors.This provides a scientific basis for adopting low-carbon process technologies.Future work should aim to continuously improve database development,establish internationally recognized system boundaries for leather LCA,and develop a unified allocation method for the environmental footprint of raw hides.Additionally,the integration of LCA with techno-economic analysis should be further promoted. Conclusions and Prospects The frontier research reviewed in this paper aims to promote the green and high-quality development of the leather industry and is expected to provide practical,feasible guidance for the industry's transition toward high-quality,sustainable development in China.