Lanxess executive defends chrome
04/06/2010
Speaking in London on June 3 at the third Beast to Beauty conference, Dr Dietrich Tegtmeyer, vice-president of product development and product application for the Lanxess leather business, said greener chemicals were coming onto the market.
He told the conference, organised by World Leather and specialist training consultancy Leather Wise, that green chemicals are products that are safer to handle, more efficient in producing the result expected of them during the tanning process, produce less waste, have a lower energy footprint, offer higher levels of biodegradability and recyclability, and use a higher proportion of natural raw materials in their composition.
Dr Tegtmeyer said fatliquors and syntans were good examples of product that chemicals manufacturers are improving in this way. He added that about 70% of Lanxess’s research and development budget was devoted to helping its customers become more sustainable.
Then he commented on the ongoing debate over the relative green credentials of chrome and vegetable tanning agents. “We have to be careful in rushing to judge,” he said. “All the alternatives have their own advantages and disadvantages but I think it is wrong to say that, from an eco perspective, vegetable tanning must be the best and chrome tanning the worst. For example, chrome is so effective, tanners can use it in much smaller quantities. You to use a lot more volume of veg tannage to produce the leather. That’s important.”
He told the audience that about 80% of all the chemical products used in the tanning process are not present in finished leather, meaning they go into waste material. In the face of this, it is a good idea to try to do something else with the residue—reuse or recycle as much of it as possible, for example—but he insisted that it is better to use less of the chemicals in the first place.
If some observers raise eyebrows at the use of chrome because it is a metal, Dr Tegtmeyer’s response is that less than 5% of all the chrome in industrial use globally goes into leather, with 95% of it going into steel. “And steel is recycled, as everybody knows,” he said. “Chrome is the most recycled element in the Periodic Table.”
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