A Lancaster, Pennsylvania, company has developed an environmentally friendly process to recycle leather.
KOAT 7 Action News reports that many leather goods manufacturers, including Wilson Sporting Goods, create tons of leather scraps each year as a byproduct of the manufacturing process.
Sustainable Composites LLC has designed a process to recycle those unused leather scraps — which normally would be simply discarded and end up in landfills — into a product it calls “enspire leather.” The company claims on its Facebook page that its product is “the first 100% recycled leather product.”
“We have a couple different companies (we’re) working with now, taking their stuff and recycling it,” Franklin Fox of Sustainable Composites told KOAT 7 Action News. “We are able to truly reconstitute another material, something that’s thrown away, and bring it back to its original state.”
The discarded leather scraps are ground together and then mixed with chemicals before it is dried and pressed into sheets of the recycled leather material. The company says that, although the product is made completely out of leather and looks and smells like leather, it can’t legally be called leather.
“If you call it leather, legally it has to be coming off a cow,” Fox told KOAT 7 Action News.
KOAT reports that “enspire leather” has the look, feel and smell of leather but costs roughly 30% less than real leather.
