Cultural ties
A one-month secondment to share some of her leather technology knowledge with staff and students at Auezov University in Kazakhstan was enough to convince Professor Eser Eke Bayramoglu that the industry there has great potential.
Existing links between the leather engineering department at Ege University in Turkey and the Auezov University in Kazakhstan became firmer at the end of 2021 and the start of this year when Ege’s professor Eser Eke Bayramoglu travelled east to teach and carry out technical research in Auezov’s product technology and design departments.In total, Dr Bayramoglu spent a month there, teaching undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students and spending time with Auezov academics to help them prepare to put new impetus into their own leather teaching. She also ran a master-class in which the Kazakh students made leather bags. She says her visit to the university, which is in the city of Shymkent in the south of Kazakhstan, made her optimistic about the future of leather education in that part of the world.Cross-border cooperation
There has been an agreement in place between the two universities for some years, with a steady flow of Kazakh students with an interest in leather travelling to Izmir to take part in the leather technology courses that Dr Bayramoglu and her colleagues teach at Ege. One of those students has gone on to embark on an academic career of her own at Auezov and it was she who invited her former teacher to help the team in Shymkent push ahead. Cultural ties between the two countries are strong.
The product technology and design departments she engaged with form part of Auezov’s light industry faculty and their remit extends beyond leather. There is, for example, substantial interest in textiles, too. “The students there look at a whole range of materials,” Dr Bayramoglu says.
Equal opportunities
Something she found encouraging is that most of the students she encountered in Shymkent were women and, of a faculty staff of around 25 teachers, all but two were women. As Ege’s and, she believes, the world’s first female leather professor, a position she has held for the last seven years, this made an impression on her. Some of her temporary colleagues were involved in companies manufacturing clothing in the region around the city, which is the third-biggest in the country, and the visitor from Turkey was able to visit some of the production facilities.
In the course of the month, she was also able to visit one of the few tanneries operating in Kazakhstan at the moment, Turan Skin, which has offices in downtown Shymkent and a wet blue tannery in the Ontustik Special Economic Zone, 30 minutes’ drive away. It specialises in high-quality bovine wet blue that goes, eventually, into footwear. “Kazakhstan could produce a huge amount of leather,” Dr Bayramoglu says, “but it needs more tanneries, good chemicals and skilled technicians.”
Raw materials
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, Kazakhstan’s livestock and meat sectors produced just under 3 million cattle hides in 2020, just over 1 million goatskins and 7.5 million sheepskins. With a single-digit number of tanneries across the whole of this, the ninth-largest country in the world by area, and some of those very limited in their operations, there is clearly an excess of domestic raw material to go round.
This surplus would be even greater if there were scope for making Kazakh Cordovan leather from the many horse hides emanating from the country’s abattoirs. FAO’s figure for 2020 is that Kazakhstan processed more than 800,000 horses. Dr Bayramoglu is unaware of any company using these hides, although she says she imagines many of them would show substantial cuts and other damage. Nevertheless, she says the frequency with which she was offered the national dish of Beshbarmak during her brief visit, with horse meat as the main ingredient (it can be made with mutton, lamb and other meats too) gave her an indication of how popular horse is there.
Positive outlook
Although leather is only part of the focus of the product technology and design team in Shymkent, and a relatively new part, Dr Bayramoglu’s conviction is that the university’s work can help expand the industry in Kazakhstan. And continuing ties with Turkey can help that expansion, the professor says. Doctoral students continue to travel to Ege University from Kazakhstan and Dr Bayramoglu is very confident of the positive impact these young academics will make when they go back to teach in institutions such as Auezov. “The teachers there are already positive,” she says. “Kazakhs are positive people.”
Her hope is that this positivity will encourage leather entrepreneurship among the young people these teachers host in their lecture rooms, leading to the setting up of leather and finished leathergoods manufacturers in the country, the creation of jobs and value-generating new leases of life for the country’s hides and skins. If a large proportion of the entrepreneurs are women, Dr Bayramoglu and many others will view it as a bonus.
The size of the companies they create will not matter. One of the key criteria that support leather’s status as an ideal fit for the circular economy is that it opens up pathways into circular-economy systems for all people and for companies of all sizes, including small and medium enterprises. This has happened already in many countries. It can happen in Kazakhstan too.
Professor Eser Eke Bayramoglu of Ege University in Turkey is optimistic that the leather industry in Kazakhstan can soar to new heights.
All Credits: Eser Bayramoglu.
