Sustainability


product, it generated lots of interest. “We developed a proprietary way to grind the leather but preserve the leather fibres,” says chief technical officer Tom Tymon, who co-founded the company with chairman Frank Fox.


After grinding the scrap in a particular way, the process creates a sheet of leather that can meet almost all the specifications for traditional leather, Tymon says.


“If you look at our material under a microscope, and compare it to a piece of traditional leather, they look very, very similar. You can see the leather fibre structure in both,” says CEO Don Morrison. Most importantly, Enspire Leather generates 75% less CO2


than an equal amount of new leather.


Actually, the company has three different products, Morrison explains. The first is their traditional Enspire leather, which is made from scrap waste recovered from the production of Wilson footballs. (The football might be casually called a pigskin, but it’s made from bovine leather.)


“We can’t get rid of all of the leather or all the fresh hides that go to the landfill or the incinerator, but we can slow it down, and slow down the rate of accumulating waste.”


Frank Fox, Sustainable Composites


The second product is made from cutting room scrap and the third uses deconstructed post- consumer scrap leather.


Whether or not Sustainable Composites can use a particular type of cutting room scrap depends on the type of scrap and the final application, Tymon explains. When a brand or other company wants to transform their leather scrap, they can send 50lb to Sustainable Composites for testing. The lab processes the scrap and evaluates and checks its viability. Then, the brand can choose to explore using the scrap for a particular use and specify the desired properties. Then, the scrap is tested again, this time against those specifications. They can do a production trial and, if all goes well, the company can choose to move on to doing full production.


Even though Enspire is made entirely of leather fibres, it’s still a new material. “Some of the luxury brands are wrestling with how to use this new material. Does using recycled material enhance the perceived value of their brand or does it diminish it? If you ask younger customers, using recycled leather will enhance the value,” Morrison says.


Replacing plastics


While many alternative materials have come on the market, they don’t solve the issue of leather waste. Moreover, many seek to replace leather. Enspire leather needs traditional leather scrap as a starting material.


“I think it will replace the use of other things,” says Fox. “The industry now uses polyurethane splits – they want to get rid of them.” The films and coatings used on splits and other faux leathers are not conducive to recycling and Enspire can replace those. In recycling, “this is the only alternative that


Whether or not


Sustainable Composites can use a particular type of cutting room scrap depends on the type of scrap and the final application.


12 Leather International / www.leathermag.com


bunbomi/Shutterstock.com


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