Beamhouse magic
The benefits that have accrued from the JBS Kind Leather initiative since its launch in 2019 are far-reaching.
Business as usual continues at JBS Couros while a deal to combine it with Viva Group and form the largest leather manufacturing company in the world goes through the necessary regulatory protocols. What business as usual at the São Paulo-based group entails is the processing tens of thousands of hides per day by a team of 7,000 people across facilities in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, the US, Italy and Vietnam. It has 21 tanneries in operation, with 12 of them running beamhouse operations and the others concentrating on crust and finished leather.
Sustainability director, Kim Sena, has worked at JBS Couros for ten years now and attests to the circular-economy credentials of all of these leather manufacturing plants. Where “the magic really happens”, though, is in the beamhouse. “It is mind-blowing to see how circular the leather industry can be,” he says, “and it is in the beamhouse that you can see it.”
Strong supply chains
Brazil has an agri-food sector that generates more than $500 billion per year, according to recent figures from industry body, the Confederação da Agricultura e Pecuária do Brasil (CNA). Its cattle population is 230 million head, it has more than 200 tanneries and 30,000 knowledgeable tannery workers. What this means, Kim Sena says, is that the way supply chains are designed there, it makes it possible for companies in the leather sector “to maximise circularity in the beamhouse”. He explains that this is because of the possibilities that exist for developing co-products and minimising waste.
Although it was founded in 1953, the JBS Group only launched its leather division in 2009. The origins of the group are firmly in meat-packing. Because of this, its own supply chain has connections between different companies and divisions. Mr Sena quotes José Saramago, the Portuguese language’s sole winner, so far, of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in explaining the importance of taking a step back sometimes to see the extent to which “optimising streams” from one part of the group to others is possible. “You have to leave the island in order to see the island,” he says. Now, though, plenty of examples have come to light.
Benefits in Kind
An important part of this story is the Kind Leather concept, which JBS Couros introduced in 2019. It presents Kind Leather as a sustainable option for customers because the process uses less water and fewer chemicals. It increases productivity and reduces cutting waste further along the tanning production chain. The whole idea is based on assessing each hide and using only the parts “best suited to making leather”. This mainly involves cutting off material from the belly and neck areas as soon as the hides it uses have been limed.
The company said immediately that its intention was to find ways of putting as much of the remaining material as possible to good use. In the course of the last three years, a series of lifecycle analysis (LCA) exercises have shown the benefits of this, so much so that its LCA figures helped earn JBS Couros a name-check and an improved score in the Higg Materials Sustainability Index. “To see the numbers was a way of leaving the island,” Kim Sena says.
He accepts that Kind Leather was “a provocative idea”. He says some people observed it as bringing a high level of disruption because it represented a major change to the paradigm in which tanneries have traditionally worked. “There were doubts at the start, but the solution speaks for itself,” he says. “When customers came to the cutting stage, they found Kind Leather easy to work with and they found that cutting efficiency was better. They were generating more product from the same amount of leather. They also found benefits in their companies’ emissions and other environmental aspects. Customers who began using Kind Leather soon said they did not want to go back.” As a result, two years ago, all of the JBS Couros tanneries in Brazil shifted production practices to produce only Kind Leather.
Circular spin-offs
It is a commitment that is now bearing rich fruit in other ways too. In the early part of this decade, JBS launched a number of “complementary businesses” that are proving its idea can work. These include Genu-in, which specialises in the production of collagen, peptides and gelatines for markets including wellness and nutrition. Another is Novapron+, which focuses on applications for collagen in the food industry. JBS Couros works with these businesses the way it does with all customers, Mr Sena continues. “It is good from a business standpoint,” he adds, “but what makes it even better is that these companies are able to use material that would have been waste for us. We are in continuous dialogue with Genu-in and Novapron+. We help them improve, and they do the same for us. We are effectively part of the same supply chain.”
In addition, an existing part of the JBS group, Biopower, which uses organic waste to make biodiesel, has also begun using tallow extracted during fleshing in the leather division’s beamhouses. More recently, three tanneries in Brazil have begun shipping more than 500 tonnes of chrome shavings every month as raw material for the production of high-quality fertiliser in Italy. This is the result of two years’ hard work to make sure the chrome shavings meet European regulations. Part of the benefit of this initiative is that carbon emissions in the tanneries involved have come down by between 15% and 25%. In parallel, there are ongoing studies to see if Campo Forte, a group company, can also use waste in a similar way in the future.
Kind Leather has led to the development of an in-house methodology for assessing the impact and effectiveness of leather chemicals. Any product that would increase the environmental impact of its leather is rejected. Then there is Savetan, a proprietary tanning technology that enhances deep chrome-fixation during the tanning phase. JBS Couros calculates that Savetan delivers a saving of up to 16 litres of water per hide and a 15% reduction in chemical inputs. There is also a reduction of 42% in salt usage, of 65% in the volume of sludge the process generates and of 65% in the residual chrome in the tanning bath. Energy efficiency gains are another benefit, with a 52% reduction in thermal energy consumption. Savetan is in use in three tanneries in Brazil at the moment, but the company plans to expand this to all the production units it has in its home country by the end of 2026.
Change can happen
Kim Sena says this “recent evolution” of how JBS Couros makes leather make him optimistic about the future. More widely, after a decade of working on the company’s sustainability strategy and observing developments in the global leather value chain, he says he is happy to see that “some things” have changed. At first, he had the impression (one shared by many) that the industry was talking mostly to itself when it tried to address questions on circularity. Again, he mentions the Saramago observation. “We must not hide from these discussions,” he insists. “We have to take a holistic approach. If we stick to a drum-tannery-shaving machine mindset, we are limiting ourselves.”
Speaking up about false claims from competitors, and for the leather industry to do this in a co-ordinated way, is part of this. “Companies work independently of each other, which is natural,” he accepts. “But in other industries you see pre-competitive collaboration. In leather, we definitely have the opportunity to organise ourselves better.” In the face of claims from the producers of alternatives that their materials are more sustainable, the market, which is to say designers, brands and consumers, will decide. He says there are pros and cons for leather in having a history that spans millennia. “It has been around for ever because it is amazing,” he observes, “but we can also get into proper, technical discussions with them, with the data in hand,” he insists. “This has to improve our chances of success.”
Two years ago, all of the JBS Couros tanneries in Brazil shifted production practices to produce only Kind Leather. The process uses less water and fewer chemicals, increases productivity and reduces cutting waste. Credit: JBS Couros
