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How can we value the ten tons of leather trimmings that result from our industrial operation every month? The managers and staff from ERT raised this question in the middle of the last decade, and since then, they have been working to solve it.
In 2017, CITEVE (plus CeNTI, plus CTIC, the leather technology center) joined the team that was looking for an answer to this question. And the research and development project started five years ago within the scope of Texboost, one of the pillars of the establishment of symbioses between industry and entities in the scientific sector, in the sense of the sustainability of the textile and clothing industry and a circular economy.
In 2020, the project ended with a positive answer to the question – a process was found to convert leather waste into textile coatings for the manufacture of components for the automotive industry.
The path was not easy. The first attempt, which started with mechanical shredding of leather residues, did not provide a uniform coating.
With the collaboration of Mónica Gonçalves, the ERT designer, the R&D team tested the use of clothing solutions from this first result of their research. They were not satisfied.
The consortium members continued the search for a process that provides a uniform coating. Until, a Eureka moment happened in the hydrolysis method, which consists of using a chemical that extracts protein from leather, a sustainable, biologically-based process that uses recycled polymers to make the reverb.
“It has been a long journey, during which we have been optimizing solutions, introducing improvements, and perfecting the process in which a considerable percentage of recycled products were used, with a lower environmental impact than natural leather. A process, therefore, susceptible to receiving the Global Recycled Standard certification”, explains Augusta Silva, Innovation, Stamping, and Coating Manager at CITEVE.
In 2020, the Project Texboost was developed in partnership with a consortium led by CITEVE and ERT. The ending was happy. ERT acquired the industrial rights to explore the new product, which it named Phoenix (an allusion to the rebirth of waste), filed a patent application (which was accepted), and continued its development with its funds and new industrial partners.
“We had ahead of our vectors for the development of our work. In the first phase, we studied the industrialization of the process, collecting information about the equipment it needed and the consumption of water and energy it implied. We then carried out a pilot test with our partners based on the requirements of the main European car manufacturers, which we were always listening to and keeping abreast of all developments in our work”, says David Macário, Director of Innovation at ERT.
Manufacturers such as Mercedes, BMW, or the VW group already expressed interest in the new and innovative product – and are closely following the process, to the point where recycled leather is already being tested in a concept car.
Despite having successfully managed the migration from the laboratory to the factory, ERT is now committed to making recycled leather economically viable. “Right now, the price of recycled leather is at odds with that of leather. We are engineering the product to industrialize it as cheaply as possible”, says the Director of Innovation from ERT, adding that they are making an effort to lower the price, but not at all costs.