The race to trace
Curtume Krumenauer has projects in place to use only renewable energy, to provide traceability on its raw material and to send wastewater and leather scraps for use in circular agricultural projects.
Brazilian leather manufacturer Krumenauer has developed its own method of achieving hide traceability and is sharing the information with its customers. This is one of a series of initiatives the company has put in place to make its leather production as circular as it can.
Krumenauer specialises in making veg-tanned leather from Brazilian wet white, and veg-retanned leather from US wet blue for manufacturers of shoes, leathergoods, belts and craft projects. It has said 15% of its output this year is staying in Brazil to supply shoe manufacturers in the domestic market. Commercial director, Joel Krummenauer (some members of the family, which arrived in Brazil from Germany in the 1850s, use a double-m, while others use the same spelling as the company name), says 95% of production went for export in 2021, with just 5% staying in the domestic market. But 2022 brought a change.
He also explains that prolonged lockdowns in China, plus wider supply chain and transportation difficulties led brands to increase their sourcing of finished products such as footwear from Brazil. This has increased local demand for the company’s leather. “The footwear factories here are pretty busy and have good orders at least until November or December,” he says. “Demand for our leather from footwear manufacturers is increasing.”
Production is different
The family business began exactly 111 years ago and Joel Krummenauer is part of the fourth-generation to run the tannery, which is located in Portão, near Novo Hamburgo. The oldest part of the current facility is from 1911, but the building has undergone various phases of redevelopment since then. Until the 1980s, all of the company’s leather was made from local hides and went to local furniture manufacturers, whose products were destined for the domestic market.
“Production now is very different,” the commercial director says. The wet white it sources from Brazil comes from the central and northern regions of the country, hundreds, even thousands of kilometres away. Mimosa is the main tanning agent and for this there are local sources in the shape of Seta and Tanac, the latter of which is located only 30 kilometres from the tannery. Krumenauer’s current capacity is a maximum of 1,000 hides per day, producing articles of varying thickness, ranging from 0.81 millimetres as a minimum to as much as 4.5 millimetres for applications including saddles and single-layer belts.
Benefits for farmers
About half of the hides Krumenauer tans at the moment leave for the US market as natural leathers; customers in the US like the neutral appearance as well as the quality of this material and apply their own designs, logos and colours to it. One benefit from this is that the water the company uses to retan these hides and make natural leather can and does go straight onto the fields of local farmers. Joel Krummenauer enjoys talking about sustainability issues such as these but points out that it is not new. “We have been giving local farmers this wastewater for around ten years now,” he explains. “The farmers ask us for it because it works; it’s just water plus nutrients from the bark of the mimosa, which are rich in nitrogen.”
In a newer agricultural initiative, shavings from the Krumenauer tannery are now going into fertiliser production. In times past, this material had other uses, for example in the manufacture of adhesives. For it to go into products that enrich the soil makes it more circular. Back at the tannery, there are certificates on the wall to confirm that there is a policy in place to use only renewable energy, something the company has been committed to since 2016.
Stamp of approval
It has begun to enhance its environmental credentials by marking all of the wet white it buys in from Brazilian partners for traceability. Under the bright lights of the sorting and grading table, a member of the team puts a stamp into the corner of each hide to show the supplier’s identity and an invoice code to give proof-of-purchase information, including the date of purchase. “This information will take the user of the hide back to the slaughterhouse,” Mr Krummenauer explains.
Naturally, this race to trace the provenance of hides carries a particular importance in Brazil where, try as it might, the leather industry struggles to shake off an unfair association with deforestation. At the very mention of it, Joel Krummenauer rolls his eyes. He has been on the receiving end of criticism, some of it hostile, for supposed connections between the whole of the Brazilian leather sector and the illegal destruction of forest environments in Amazon regions. This happened to him as recently as this July at Lineapelle New York.
“This concern for the Amazon seems to come round in cycles,” he says. “And it is perfectly understandable that clients want products and services that are as sustainable as possible. This issue must be addressed by all actors in the chain, and there are many of them, across the whole world. Lots of countries have important work to do on this.”
Commitment to sustainability is part of the fabric at Brazilian tannery Krumenauer.
All Credits: WTP
