Innovative Materials and Technologies for Sustainable Production in Leather and Footwear Sector

Leather industry has to cope nowadays with major environmental problems because of the polluting processes. Therefore, increasing the environmental efficiency in the leather sector is the major aim of leather, auxiliary materials and equipment manufacturers. The development of new tanning agents and new technologies is required to cope with the increasingly higher environmental pressure on the current tanning materials and processes such as tanning with chromium salts. This paper presents the main results obtained in the framework of INNOVA-LEATHER project. The original contribution of this project in solving the above problems has involved the use of solid titanium wastes (cuttings) resulting from the process of obtaining highly pure titanium (ingots) in the preparation of new tanning compounds intended to increase the environmental efficiency of the leather sector. Also, within the above line, the aim is to obtain wet-white leather by an organic tanning process in order to reduce chromium in tannery effluent. Another result obtained in the project is valorization of wet white leather waste as raw material for obtaining new biodegradable auxiliaries with application in agriculture, cosmetics and chemicals.