Cradle to Cradle - The Real Thing

 

With so much anti-chromium chatter in the badly informed supply chain that makes up the leather industry it must be easy to gloat if you have a vegetable tannery: particularly if you have 150 years of history to go along with it.   Be careful.  Chromium may be a heavy metal with problems, but most of the complaints about chrome six are scare mongering, often with malicious intent to sell an alternate leather that does not withstand scrutiny.  Vegetable tanning has decimated the world’s mangrove swamps and for 300 years tanneries in the US were itinerant creatures as they wandered the eastern seaboard in search of more forests to lay to waste.  This is before you consider the big water requirement and the huge oxygen demand of the unspent tan.   Hamman is part of the Breuninger-Hammann group and produce leather for luxury goods, shoe manufacturing and saddle making for customers around the world who are looking for unique products.  Christoph Breuninger runs a plant that has its origins back in 1843 joining his family business with the slightly younger Hammann (1879) in 2000.  Christoph has thought through his tanning philosophy and tells you quietly “you can tan with tea leaves, you know.” Thomas Poole discovered this in 1803 but it was his friend Sir Humphry Davy who noted that the tannin concentration available from the leaves and peduncles of the sumac was very high. This is the Hammann process: top class mid-European hides in a long slow traditional sumac tanning process without compromise.   The Hammann literature gives a glimpse of those weasel words “organic tannage” but they save themselves from sliding into the false claims of the 21st century leather industry with one little claim - “certified”.   This was the word that brought the APLF judges to attention when the leather was suggested as worthy of consideration by the member from the CLRI in India. What sort of “certification” could this be?  Yet the claim was indeed one of substance: this leather is approved as a Cradle to Cradle leather.  The judges rushed to the Hammann stand to interrogate Mr. Breuninger and came away so impressed the award for the best environmental leather went through unanimously.   Top: Hammann winning product. Bottom: APLF Award on show on Hammann stand at Lineapelle    Reversing the Industrial Revolution You might say that Hammann had it made, as their processes predate the industrial revolution which came very late, after the Hammann processes had been established.  The Industrial Revolution was a period when there were few people on the plant and resources seemed infinite. No one was concerned that they were developing products and processes that were based on a cradle to grave approach that dumped used products and bi-products into land fill and did not worry much about toxic emissions and profligate use of water. Today’s cradle to cradle approach was developed by William McDonough & Michael Braungart and came to the fore when their book was published in 2002 [1]. It  demands that at the design stage we consider the resources used in terms of technical and organic nutrients and consider the lifecycle of these in the long term.  Organic materials are nutrients that can be reused in the natural world while technical materials have to be examined with great care as to their re-use, preferably being removed at the end if life for future use.  Up-cycling, not doing things "less badly" Purely chasing a smaller carbon footprint and so called eco-efficiency is only about doing things less badly rather than doing them correctly, and a typical target of cradle to cradle is when we recycle materials containing technical nutrients into inappropriate end uses.  Putting waste or used chrome tanned leather into tartan running tracks would be an example, as there is no future way to recover the chrome which has no valid function in this end use.  Proper recycling is defined as “up-cycling”. Cradle to cradle certification is a demanding process and asks questions of the company in terms of water and energy usage, and corporate ethics, as well as the technological approach.  The use of solar or geothermal energy is credited for example as is evidence of proper water stewardship with credit being given for innovative approaches to reduce water consumption or to re-use it.  These rules will exclude those who are just attempting to jump on the environmental band-wagon with “eco-leather” or “chrome free” leathers to make quick profits. The Hamman leather has some interesting features.  It is vegetable tanned and uses tannin extracted from the leaves of sumac trees.  This avoids issues that might have arisen with extracts that require the bark or the wood of the tree, where care has to be taken to manage sustainability issues.  The leather is air dried without any artificial heating, and all the shavings are used as fertiliser.   The final leather is one whose elements are conceived as retrievable nutrients, a leather which maximises the beauty and value of a natural material.  Yes, the process still uses the limes and sulphides needed to remove the hair and produces wastes that are costly and difficult to manage, so there are challenges still for the future.   What the cradle to cradle approach appears to offer the leather industry, from start to the final consumer product, is a sound and honest methodology to find a route to products to be proud of, and a challenge to make more beautiful innovate articles. And many more APLF awards.    [1] Cradle to Cradle/remaking the way we make things, William McDonough & Michael Braungart North Point Press, 2002 Michael Redwood   If you wish to contribute to the APLF News, with your experiences in the industry, your observations, or general thoughts on the direction the industry is going, we would like to hear from you. Email: aplf-news@aplf.com How long has your company been attending APLF? If you wish to be involved in the celebration of the 25th anniversary of APLF, we would like to hear from you. Email: aplf-news@aplf.com. Subject Headline: APLF 25th Anniversary