Environmental Impacts and Sustainability of Tannery: A Case Study

Leather has been a commodity since ancient times, when primitive men hunted animals for food and used their hides and skins for clothes and tents. Nowadays, the tanning process is highly industrialised. The chromium tanning is the most widely used because it produces high-quality leather despite its serious environmental impacts. The purpose of this study is to analyse the environmental impact of an Indian company that carries out post-tanning operations on bovine hides, that is to say, from the so-called wet-blue to finished crust. To do this, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is implemented using the primary data provided by the company. The analysis has been carried out by the OpenLCA software, and 16 environmental impact categories have been evaluated. The results show that the processes for producing fuel (coal and diesel oil) and chromium(III) salts are the main contributors to the environmental impact for nearly all categories. These types of impacts are upstream, whereas the operations carried out by the company have impacts on the climate change category, due to the use of fossil fuels in the production process. Therefore, the direct action that the company could take is the substitution of fuel to produce energy with a renewable energy source. The comparison of these results with the whole tanning process present in the software confirms the limited impact of the post-tanning. At last, the results also evidence the methodological value of Life Cycle Assessment, which can be used to show what can be improved in one installation to reduce its environmental impact.