Fertiliser matters
One consequence of the war in Ukraine is a shortage, and huge hike in the cost, of materials for making fertilisers. This is sparking fears of food insecurity in the developing world. Waste material from leather manufacturing is already widely used in fertiliser production.
Now would be a good time for tanners everywhere to find ways of contributing to this effort.
The way non-profit group The Ellen MacArthur Foundation looks at things, three principles must be at the core of all our efforts to make economies more circular. We must eliminate waste and pollution, put the products and materials we consume back into circulation when we no longer want them, and we must contribute to the regeneration of nature. In the sphere of the global economy, these consequences have been widely discussed and are well documented. Energy prices, which were already on the rise, have soared. Supplies of grain from Ukraine are disrupted, pushing food prices up. Global agriculture is suffering because fertiliser is now in short supply and expensive.
All of leather’s rightful claims to be part of the circular economy connect to one or more of these principles. Perhaps one of the less glamorous of these claims is that waste from the leather manufacturing process can have use and value in agriculture. Sludge is seldom glamorous, but for years creative companies have found ways to use it in fertiliser, giving it back to the earth. Agriculture and the food industry supply tanners with hides and skins to make leather; to use waste from leather production in turn to help farmers grow more food is completely circular.
All continents
Fertiliser projects with connections to tanning have cropped up on all continents in recent years. In 2020, on presenting developments in its Ecotan range of technologies, Silvateam explained that the concept means using only natural products to make leather, with specialist partners ready take the material back at the end of a product’s useful life for use in fertiliser production. The following year, Mexican tanning group Suelas Wyny signed up to start using the technology to make a range of leather called Nexta.
This coincided with a successful project in which an Igualada-based fertiliser producer, Labin, teamed up with some of the leather manufacturers in the Barcelona leather cluster to use tannery waste as raw material for products it went on to present to the agri-food sector as organic fertiliser.
Around the same time, Piel Color said it wanted to build a large, new, state-of-the-art tannery in Egypt. Converting leather waste into organic fertiliser was part of the plan there from the outset. And among a range of projects sparking interest among leather manufacturers in Asia, an initiative to turn solid waste into fertiliser was one of the few bright spots to emerge last year from the saga of Savar, the tanning cluster that the industry in Bangladesh has been striving to establish for 20 years now.
More recently, but more extensively, Brazil-based group JBS announced in March that it was setting up its own fertiliser manufacturing operation. A company called Campo Forte Fertilizantes, which will be based in Guaiçara in the interior of the São Paulo state, will have the capacity to produce 150,000 tonnes of fertiliser per year, using waste from across JBS’s operations. The group said this move followed a pilot study from as long ago as 2016, but it has now invested more than $25 million to get Campo Forte up and running.
Pioneers’ path
Two Italian biotech companies, ILSA and SICIT, have been powerful pioneers in this arena. ILSA, for example, announced last year that, since launching a division of its own in Brazil in 2019, it had transformed more than 300,000 tonnes of waste from the Brazilian leather industry into fertiliser, taking waste from tanneries and subjecting it to thermal hydrolysis to create products that make soil more fertile. It turns tanning waste first into a type of gelatine, rich in organic nutrients and carbon, and then subjects the gelatine to a drying process to produce fertiliser.
For its part, SICIT uses residues from the leather manufacturing process to make amino acid- and peptide-based fertilisers. SICIT has estimated that every 1,000 kilos of raw hides yields around 250 kilos of finished leather and up to 600 kilos of solid by-products. Some of these by-products, including fleshings, hair, trimmings and shavings, are what SICIT calls “recoverable tannery residuals”. SICIT has been attempting to put these residual materials to good use for more than 60 years now. Its products help plants, from seed germination to crop maturity, to leverage natural mechanisms and thrive. It set up a division in China in 2016 and one in the US in 2018. Milan-based group, Circular BidCo S.p.A, moved to acquire SICIT in July 2021.
Growing concerns
If more tanners around the globe could find ways now of passing waste material from their production operations to specialist partners in agri-business and bio-stimulant manufacturing, their timing would be good. As the war in Ukraine continues, the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) says its concern is increasing, not only about the humanitarian crisis, but also about the impact rising prices and shortages of staple crops will have on the world’s most vulnerable people. It warns that conflict in one region can often spark unrest in another as food insecurity and inflation exacerbate poverty and social instability.
Lebanon is an example of the countries that are currently being adversely affected by the consequences of the war. Russia is the largest exporter of grain in the world, and Ukraine the fifth-largest, according to The Economist. Lebanon imports 80% of its wheat from those two countries. Owing to the explosion at the port of Beirut in 2020, which destroyed the country’s most important grain silos, Lebanon can now only store about one month’s worth of wheat at a time. With 22% of families there already food insecure, IFAD says, a protracted war in Ukraine will have severe consequences in Lebanon.
Planting season
At the same time, disruptions in global supply chains of agricultural inputs, including fertiliser, owing to the war could also have what IFAD calls “long-term negative consequences for small-scale producers”, particularly as they start a new planting season and face fertiliser shortages and price hikes. For example, the agency says, two-thirds of people in the Central African Republic live in poverty. A major constraint for the country’s food sector is poor agricultural inputs. Spikes in prices will impact use of fertiliser and yields, placing an added burden on the country’s efforts to achieve food security and poverty reduction.
IFAD’s response so far to the war in Ukraine is a call to protect the livelihoods of small-scale farmers and the rural poor, ensuring they can meet upcoming planting and harvesting seasons, and securing their immediate food security. “This means ensuring producers have access to key resources for production” it states clearly.
Tannery sludge may not look attractive to everyone, but if it can help alleviate the consequences of war and feed people in the developing world, no one could argue that it is without value.
A small-scale farmer in Nigeria reaps the benefits of an International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) programme to give communities there access to fertilisers.
Credits: IFAD/Bernard Kalu
