Welcome to the 2000% club

Statistics from France’s Conseil National Du Cuir provide a reminder of just how much value tanners and finished product manufacturers are able to add to hides. In the right hands, the worth of the waste that the meat and dairy sectors generate can increase by more than 2000% (two thousand per cent).

In 2019, French tanners and their customers took €665 million worth of waste from the meat and dairy sectors and converted it into products, such as this jacket from the latest collection from Jitrois, that generate €14.4 billion in revenues. Credit: Jitrois.

There have been concerns in the global leather industry for several years about hides and skins being destroyed or going into landfill following animal slaughter instead of being transported to a tannery for processing. We reported in World Leather April-May that the Leather and Hide Council of America (LHCA) believes 5.5 million US hides to have failed to make it into the leather value chain in 2019. Its initial calculation is that wasting these hides allowed $35.75 million to go down the drain. This figure refers only to the economic value of the raw material. We want in this article to explore how much value tanners and finished product manufacturers can add to this.

LHCA worked out that it would have been possible to turn these 5.5 million hides into millions of finished products to create even more value. It said the material could have produced 99 million pairs of shoes, 110 million footballs or 2 million leather sofas, but it did not try to work out how much extra money these products could have generated. Fortunately, figures that France’s Conseil National du Cuir…