June 17, 2025

Managing unhelpful complexity

If you want to know why you must pay your dues to your trade association, find your way to the recording of last week’s EU Green Week Event: Leather, a Natural Choice for the Circular Economy, run by Cotance. Many did – reportedly 300 plus people from 20 countries were online.

I normally do a jigsaw while watching webinars; anything more serious and you miss bits, but do nothing and you start thinking about other matters and miss everything. But this couple of hours was captivating and I found myself taking notes and screenshots throughout.

It was in some ways difficult because it was essentially one reference after another while explaining what tanners must look out for and why they should take prompt action to meet new legislation. Most of the detail was European but, in a globalised world, EU legislation ends up affecting us all, as with the ill-considered EUDR Deforestation Regulation.

Similarly, California’s Proposition 65 (Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986) became a major problem when lawyers decided to collect income from their calculations of hexavalent chromium concentrations in finished articles in stores. This was soon sending shivers through the global world of leather because it was hard to guarantee finished products such as golf gloves (sheepskin was a particular issue here) could be kept out of Californian stores. Action by the Leather and Hide Council of America on behalf of the industry largely saved the day.

Properly funded associations

This all adds up to our absolute need for properly funded and managed trade associations. We require these bodies to keep us fully informed of all such issues and to put effort into ensuring bad ideas do not end in legislation. And we all know that there is a mountain of non-scientific thinking running around leather and where it comes from. Who could imagine that a move away from an agrarian economy into an urbanised society could so greatly damage common sense about the nature and origin of food and natural materials? Without a strong, watchful lobby, many scientific errors will continue to enter regulations.

The Secretary General of Cotance complained that today’s LCAs do not give leather and synthetics equivalent treatment and make leather look bad. While fighting for more integrity in the calculations, he could perhaps ask for a “melancholy” charge to be put on synthetics since at the end of the day those buying such cheap goods for their Instagram postings are gaining no fundamental lasting benefit from their ownership. The underlying outcomes are more landfill and mental health problems

Via Gustavo Defeo, we again saw the evidence that part of leather’s problem might be trying to improve by using too many chemicals. Looking at the carbon from fossil fuels in selected materials compared to leathers, some heavily coated leathers are quite close to the best alternatives. This is a moment when we need to be emphasising the nature-based origins of leather. It is hard to decry petro-fibres when you are ladling similar material thickly onto your leather surface.

Perhaps the famous January 1912 patent granted to Dr Edmund Stiasny of Leeds England (he was about to take over from Professor Procter) by the Imperial Patent Office in Vienna did the leather industry more harm than good. In the same month, he signed a deal with chemical company BASF to produce a continuously developing stream of replacement and auxiliary synthetic tannins which, with the occasional flop, were to transform the leather industry. Not least as it probably marked the shift of the control of the technology of leather from tanneries to the supply industry.

During my career, chemical and machinery companies have in fact been good friends. I well remember the huge help given to me by chemical companies when I started as a tannery technician in the UK, and by the machinery companies I met in Italy when working in Italy. Both helped me enormously when I was running a tannery in El Salvador where supply chain problems often required improvisations. I am sure all technical staff have many such stories of reliance on the suppliers and great friendships which grew out of them. But that is different from conceding technical ownership.

The question now is whether or not the complexity of auxiliaries at every stage – retanning, dyeing and fatliquoring systems, and the new world of finishing – is positively improving our leathers for customers and all consumers.

How the plethora of chemicals we use play out in the waste disposal scenario was clarified by Karl Flowers when discussing the importance of looking closely at end-of-life. With leather items lasting so long and capable of refurbishment, it sometimes feels this area can be ignored but he is clearly correct that it does matter. Especially for footwear.

A rush through the Green Deal, Extended Product Responsibility, Circular Economy Plans, Circularity Gap, Article 22 (organic recycling) and Article 35 (end-of-life for vehicles) is dizzying long before you think about soil degradation and the Bioeconomy Action Plan. But it was very well explained.

With the full set of talks recorded, hopefully you will soon find this on the Cotance YouTube channel or elsewhere. This maze of regulations is shown to be manageable, but not to be ignored. Any fear for leather from regulations certainly subsides.

With the help of good trade associations, working hard as demonstrated and present at the key moments, tanners should be able to get on with their main purpose: supplying consumers with simple, beautiful, long-lasting leathers they will cherish.

Michael Redwood

Leather chemist, writer, and advisor on responsible leather manufacturing and material strategy. This article was originally written for ILM.