Pretreatment of eliminating FFA is needed to make biodiesel from animal fat recovered from leather wastes because its acid value is high. This study was carried out to investigate the influence of 4 different pretreatment methods, which are heterogeneous catalyst method, ion exchange resin method, low pressure.high temperature method, and alkali method on the eliminating FFA and fatty acid composition. The results showed that the rate of eliminating FFA increased in the order of alkali method > catalyst method > low pressure high temperature method > ion exchange method. In the case of pretreatment of alkali method using NaOH, the rate of eliminating FFA appeared more than 86% regardless of acid value. Therefore, it was considered that alkali method using NaOH was the most effective in the view of economical and productive aspects, taking it into account that the acid value of animal fat recovered from fleshing scrap generated during leather making processes was 7 to 8.

Fleshing scrap is a kind of wastes produced during leather making process and used in the test of manufacturing biodiesel. The early step of manufacturing biodiesel is fat recovery from fleshing scrap. Hence, we investigated the influence of the way of fat recovery on the fatty acid composition. We used three different recovery ways, that is chemical method by protein decomposition with acid/fat recovering, physical method by protein denaturalization with heat and vacuum/fat pressing, and biodiesel method by protein decomposition/fat recovering. The biological method yielded the best results in terms of appearance transparency. It was most effective to lower acid value. Also the recovered fat by biological method would be favorable methyl-ester reaction raw material for biodiesel because it contains more than 5% of oleic acid among unsaturated fatty acid.