Leather has a history of reinventing itself

Mike Redwood

Columnist

International Leather Maker

For the past 12,000 years at least (the period for which we are certain leather was made in workshops with specialist tools), leather has constantly reinvented itself. There was never a straight line of technical and aesthetic improvement to market dominance. Every new material unearthed – wood, metal, glass, pottery, textile – took market share and leather had to adapt to work better in new segments in agricultural, industrial and military settings, and in everyday life.

Yet leather remained a strategic material well into the twentieth century. Its position was then knocked by the combustion engine killing the equine market and technical textile taking large sections of leather clothing. So, leather ignored the simplistic segmentation of footwear, upholstery, leather goods and the like and transformed for a world thinking in a different way. A world of consumer power where concepts of quiet luxury, fashion and style, bikers seeking adventure, fetishes and bondage, excitement and seduction, elegance and sophistication, authenticity and enduring beauty continued to evolve.

From crisis to something even worse

Even so, many hides do not make it to the tannery these days and the leather industry’s output is in decline. Reinvention has lost its momentum and the leather industry is sliding quietly from crisis to something even worse. Is there a solution? Last week the current Chair of Leather Naturally, Dr Luis Zugno, wrote in his ILM opinion piece about the need for new fundamental change being required and how this can not happen without a major cultural rethink. I may have found a catalyst.

Synergy between leather and agriculture

Given that so much misery in the industry has not driven revolutionary change, perhaps the answer might lie within the thinking being promoted by an EU funded Symbios project involving Cotance. This is studying industrial symbiosis between the agrifood and leather sectors with a strong focus on circularity and skills development. I was delighted to be invited to attend their first online meeting.

By its very definition such a project has to get tanners to look beyond the tannery doors and even the supply chain. Tanners must look more widely at the entire business network if they are to thoroughly understand the best management of resources, materials, byproducts, energy or knowledge, to reduce waste, cut environmental impacts and create new circular value chains. The complete landscape must be understood where things are done, why they are done, what happens with every part that comes off the animal as a hide or skin.

That requires looking at chemicals, animal husbandry, energy and water sources and utilisation, both hybrid and full biomaterials new-gen materials, and every part of a hide that does not get used as leather.

Scanning in this way is seriously instructive. For I moment I found myself looking at the leather industry of my student days, when my vacations were spent working in a very traditional vegetable tannery, where apart from a very inadequate wastewater system every tannery waste was used, helped by having a gelatine factory. Trimmings went to leatherboard. Hides were rounded (cut into sections – butts, bellies, shoulders as appropriate) after liming so that every piece was processed according to its qualities and grading.

Today, gelatine plants are few and far between and solutions for shavings and trimmings are complicated by chromium and other chemicals. Since the middle 20th century, production has moved from hides to sides and the bovine industry has become accustomed to shipping in wet-blue as a standard. At one stage, there was a lobby that all rawhides should be shipped as wet-blue so that hair, flesh and dung should not travel with them.

Vital importance of adding value

The current way tanners and the wider industry go about things looks quite inadequate when symbiosis takes the major focus. A critical point was raised early on in our discussions: the vital importance of adding value. Adding value was common business speak in the 1980s, promoted by the academic Michael Porter but never fully understood. The term remained in use but was subordinated to cost‑efficiency drives and the “maximise shareholder value” ideology. Efficiency started to mean speeding processes up, burning the hair off chemically rather than saving it, getting the leather through the process fast and reducing rejects with heavy finish coats covering imaginary as well as real grain blemishes; and of course, a race overseas to maximise profit without fretting about the community left behind. Looking back, this efficiency damaged people and quality and pushed leather towards commoditisation. Not everyone followed this route, but it was so commonplace that low cost petrochemical synthetics were soon improved to compete and steal market share, a process that got a permanent boost in the 2010s when hide prices skyrocketed.

Dismantling all this will not be easy but it clearly requires some fundamental rethinking at a time when farming is moving towards a regeneration mentality with both silva-pasture and the protection of long-term grassland now more important. One might realistically dream to see oak coppice plantations once again providing a tan bark crop every twenty years, and the meeting heard of new vegetable tanning materials possibly becoming available from the agriculture industry – emulating the thinking that won Sir Humphry Davy the then “Nobel” prize for science – The Copley Medal in 1805.

The edible protein market is changing, the biomaterial market has seen off the pretenders (MycoWorks have just closed their Union, South Carolina facility) and those involved now plus those making hybrid materials are more capable and strategically sensible: and ready to collaborate with the tanning industry.

In Europe, many tanners still process a great deal of local raw material from raw so a new thought process can be brought to play, one that might start to open minds, create true excitement in fundamentally rethinking how we make leather and do our business in the 21st century. It is time for the revolutionary reinvention of leather.

mike@internationalleathermaker.com

You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.

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