Australia: wet blue tannery to close
19/01/2012
Nippon Meat Packers Australia (NMPA) said on January 18 that its New Wave Leathers tannery in Toowoomba, Queensland, was no longer competitive. It currently employs 38 full-time members of staff and 15 casual workers, and processes around 20,000 wet blue hides every week.
NMPA has said it may be able to offer some New Wave Leathers workers jobs elsewhere in the group, at its Oakey abbatoir, for example, which is around 30 kilometres from the tannery.
A member of the Australian Hide, Skin and Leather Exporters Association, Reno Rossetto, told broadcaster ABC that wet blue tanners across the country have two main problems at the moment. The high value of the Australian dollar has cost them up to 15% of product-value in recent months. At the same time, demand for Australian hides has shifted from Europe (in the late 1990s, which he described as a peak period, around 45% of Australian hides were tanned to wet blue stage in Australia before being shipped to customers in Italy) to China. “Chinese tanners prefer to buy salted hides,” he said.
Mr Rossetto, who is procurement manager for Geelong Leather in Victoria, said that many of the tanning companies that remain in Australia are stable and have invested heavily in their businesses.
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