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overview


How Leather Gets From Cows to Cars


Peter J. Helfer


Managing Partner Campex LLC Exeter, NH


Leather is so popular among US car buyers that even very inexpensive vehicles such as this Dodge Dart can feature leather-wrapped steering wheels, shift knobs and boots and even seating surfaces.


F


or most people not involved in the leather industry, hides would seem to fall off a cow’s back, become leather and then fi nd their way onto peoples’ feet and


into cars’ interiors. The tanner’s profession is said to be one of the oldest in the world, and consequently also the oldest design activity ever since human beings covered themselves for protec- tion in animal skins and stopped the skins from putrefying. An example of just how old tanning is was found along with the Iceman. Also known as Otzi, his frozen 5300-year-old body—complete with leather articles—was found in 1991 in a melting glacier in the Alps on the Italian-Austrian border. Producing a piece of fi nished leather today combines a number of industrial chemical and mechanical processes which also include controls and tests, and which with modern technology becomes more and more sophisticated.


Leather can be produced from any animal skin, and the tanning process stabilizes collagen protein chains to stop the hides or skins from decomposing. Usually leather is a byproduct from another process, such as the food industry. Cattle are slaughtered for the meat, and using the hides for producing leather is actually part of a recycling process. If this were not so there would be a serious dis- posal problem. Leather’s initial applications were mainly for footwear because of leather’s excellent longevity, its stretch and breathing capability. However leather is and has been used for many other applications such as armor, quivers, garments, belts (including industrial belts), luggage, bags, and for furniture upholstery and seating in horse-driven coaches, later to be followed by vegetable-tanned leather in early automobiles.


23 — Motorized Vehicle Manufacturing 2015


Photos courtesy FCA US


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