Applications of Life Cycle Assessment to Leather Industry - An Overview and a Case Study

Global temperature increase is attributed to industrial pollution, rising number of automotive vehicles, deforestation, growing use of chemical fertilizers etc. In the future the potential increase of temperature even by 2°C could have a dramatic impact on life on Earth. Leather industry activities use hazardous chemical substances that generate an important quantity of CO2 with a direct impact on global warming. The first part of the paper presents the LCA concept, methodologies and some relevant LCA studies for leather industry as a means to identify the main environmental impact “contributors”. In the second part the paper presents a gate-to-gate Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) case study for processing a leather assortment. The analyzed assortment is natural full grain, bovine leather, thickness 1.4-1.6 mm, domestic raw material, manufactured by a Romanian tannery in one year period. The study was conducted using GaBi ts - Life Cycle Assessment software, version 7.2.2.28, 2016.