Producing leather today relies on tanning raw hide or skin to produce a stable, durable and breathable material that people seek out for its beauty as well as practicality. Despite significant demand from the fashion industry, today, no replacement material can offer the full properties of leather and thus its production grows yearly. However, the leather tanning process is known to be harmful to humans and the environment: it involves the extensive use of harmful chemical products, such as chromium salts (Category 1 carcinogens), and is very resource-intensive. Over 100 billion tonnes of water and 1 billion tonnes of chemical waste is produced by the tanning industry annually. At the same time, only about 20% of the raw hide becomes leather, after which time, more than 20% of the leather material is further wasted through cut-off disposal due to the constraints of hide shapes, sizes and quality.
At a time when environmental campaigners, pressure groups and growing portions of society are increasingly demanding change towards more sustainable societies and economies, our product, Gelatex, has the potential to eliminate the highly chemically polluting, water-intensive and wasteful genuine leather tanning industry. Gelatex is the first fabric with identical chemical composition and properties to leather, made from gelatine (a waste product from the meat industry). The overall objectives of the Gelatex project, to reproducibly guarantee high quality, durability and leather-like properties, have been outlined to be: 1) Optimisation of Gelatex material properties and pilot line construction, necessary for the preparation of sufficient material for pilot capsule collections; 2) Preparation of production scaling and quality assurance; 3) Material certifications and IP strategy development; and 4) effective deployment and execution of our pre-commercialisation and communication strategies.
