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Sustainability Sustainability


W want not aste not,


Vera Dordick speaks to experts from Sustainable Composites and Recircled to find out about a new life for leather waste.


T


he global leather industry creates four billion pounds of scrap leather waste every year. Currently, that’s mainly sent to landfills or incinerated. As shareholders and governments push brands and other companies to be more sustainable, recycling that scrap can keep it out of landfill and give it new life – and new value. Leather waste is not all created equally. “Some recycled leather is made from wet-blue scrap and some is made from tannery scrap, but production scrap is the hardest one because there is more of a risk for contamination by other materials,” says sustainability consultant Liz Alessi.


Leather International / www.leathermag.com


Despite the differences and challenges, Alessi says there are companies successfully turning these scraps – along with post-consumer leather waste – into new leather without adding plastic. At the top of the list is Sustainable Composites, the company that has developed Enspire Leather. Founded in 2012, Sustainable Composites spent seven years on research and development to create the material that is a complement to, and not a replacement for, traditional hide leather. Early projects that used wet-blue shavings were not successful. But, as they took in the feedback and once they developed the right


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