Journal — Vegetable tanning RSS

In recent years, even decades, the leather industry has caused many environmental hazards across the globe due to its chemical nature of material production. This dire state of affairs prompted scientists to refine both new and old solutions to manufacturing practices that will mitigate the negative effects on our ecosystem. The result of this extensive research pointed to vegetable tanning - an organic form of tanning the leather that uses a mixture of bark extracts, organic dyes, and fat liquors instead of chromium salts and other metallic based solutions. Vegetable Tanning Vs. Chrome Tanning Vegetable tanning is no recent discovery. This method has been used for thousands of years, since the dawn of civilization. If you need any proof, a...

What exactly is tanning? First things first, let’s talk about leather tanning itself, which is in its essence, transforming animal skins into actual leather. The transformation of animal skin into a piece of leather is primarily achieved by removing water molecules from the collagen of the skin, (which is the protein that the skin consists of). However when drawing out the skin might get ruined, as it gets dry and inflexible. Hence, since ancient times, (literally for thousands of years), people have been soaking the skins in natural tannings to dehydrate the leather, which replaces the water molecules and binds with the collagen, preventing the part where the leather goes stiff and inflexible! These vegetable tanning solutions are made up...