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Countries, societies, industries and in particular leather are all finding themselves in disarray recently. But it is hard to find anything quite as worrisome as what is termed the Global Lexicon of Youth Despair. This scary vocabulary covers economic futility, housing inaccessibility, mental health collapse and the rejection of traditional life paths. These areas are […]

I have no idea if any leather industry associations, be they national, regional or global, are beavering away and about to produce another leather manifesto ahead of the upcoming COP29, but it does looks as though, with all the governmental goings on – newly elected representatives and leaders plus upcoming elections – around the world, […]

It must have been a decade ago when at the end of a busy day at the ACLE Leather Fair in Shanghai I went to the Smit & zoon stand to interview their CEO about their new Product Passport. The meeting was lengthy, I had many questions. In the 1950s there was an almost endless […]

As the leather industry gears up to return to Hong Kong for APLF next week, International Women’s Day has reminded us that Mao Zedong was right when he said that “women hold up half the sky”. In many ways over these past four decades, APLF has led the way in putting skilled female staff in […]

In a weekend newspaper, the head of the UK website The Car Expert said: “The car industry is utterly reliant on people buying cars they don’t need with money they don’t have.” Runaway overconsumption has been the story of the last few decades, filling up methane-spewing landfill sites and relentlessly depleting resources. Feeding the planet […]