Located in the northern Brazilian state of Pará, Couro do Norte grew out of a family-run wet-salted hides business. Around 15 years ago it began adding extra value to local hides by turning them into wet blue and wet white and has now built up a successful beamhouse operation with clients in Asia and Europe as well as in the Americas.

The Barbosa family has been involved in the hide business for generations, starting off as wet-salted hide traders in the state of Ceará. A representative of the third generation of the family to live and breathe the business, Marcelo Barbosa moved north in 1981 to set up a new branch of the company, Couro do Norte, in Belém. He still works there today as chief executive, with his sons Fábio, who is managing director, and Leandro, who is human resources and production director. His wife, Maria, also works at the tannery managing finances and a third son, also called Marcelo, is currently running a spin-off company that produces dog-chew products although most of his activity is 600 kilometres away in the city of Imperatriz in the neighbouring state of Maranhão. “It’s a great thing to work together as a family,” the company’s founder says. “It allows us to have complete trust in one another and I’m very proud to have everyone working together. It gives me a real sense of triumph.”

Couro do Norte is a tannery that produces wet blue and wet white from the high-quality bovine hides that livestock farmers in the state of Pará have long been famous for producing. It was the attraction of this high-quality raw material that brought Marcelo Barbosa to Belém in the first place. Around 60% of the hides that come into the Couro do Norte beamhouse are from bulls, between 30% and 35% from cows and the rest from buffalo, local buffalo. Respectively, these yield averages of 48-58, 40-46 and 44-48 square-feet per hide.

Where the buffalo roam

This probably requires explanation. Belém is about 150 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean, but is a port city and seems to have water on all sides. This is because it’s at the confluence of two rivers that meet in the Baia de Guajará. South of the mouth of the Amazon itself (with the biggest river island in the world, Marajó, in the way), the bay is connected to the complex system of rivers that form the Amazon estuary. Marajó is where the water-loving buffalo roam; the island, which is roughly the size of Switzerland, has a herd of almost half a million head and a thriving buffalo meat and cheese industry and the hides are in demand too.

Green logistics

Instead, he offers the current general economic situation in Brazil as the reason for the downturn in raw material volumes. “The economy here is difficult at the moment,” Mr Barbosa explains. “Unemployment has risen, while things like energy bills have risen sharply. The hoped-for economic benefits of the FIFA World Cup in 2014 have not materialised because the country spent so much on building new stadiums. Beef has become quite expensive for ordinary consumers, so demand is down and farmers are sending fewer cattle to slaughter, waiting in the hope of a rebound in demand and an increase in the prices they can secure from the packers.” While he believes that 2016 (despite the Rio Olympic Games) may not be wonderful either for the Brazilian economy, he harbours hope that things may get back on track in 2017. In fact, he thinks Brazil has a lot to be optimistic about. “In the longer term, there are few places that can match the capacity we have in Brazil to raise cattle. The world needs food and somebody has to produce it,” he says, “and that has to be good news for Brazilian leather. The signs are already showing that the automotive industry in particular is increasing its demand for leather, possibly by millions of square-feet per year. Who has the capacity to produce those millions of square-feet? Brazil. “If anyone can provide that material, it’s us. We have the cattle, a herd size of more than 200 million in 2014, we have the slaughterhouses and tanneries, we have the know-how.”

Understanding partners

For Fábio Barbosa, there are advantages to working with Brazilian machinery manufacturers: they understand the material Brazilian tanners have to work with and understand the legislative environment under which they have to operate. An interesting example is its fleshing machine, which is Brazilian-made. Two operators working side by side, placing hides into the machine, fleshing one end and then turning it to flesh the other. They work quickly and in unison, as skilled operatives of this kind do in tanneries all over the world. Here, however, both workers have to press two buttons each, with the buttons space too far apart for this to be possible without using two hands each, before the machine starts. All four buttons must be pressed at once, meaning all four hands have to be well clear of the machine before it starts. Mr Barbosa explains that this development came about as the result of a new norm, part of health and safety legislation in Brazil, which local machinery companies are well up on and can react to quickly. Something similar has happened with the Brazilian drums that Couro do Norte has in place. It will soon be a requirement for tanners to put extra protection in place at access areas to drums and at the axle and motor of each vessel. When Couro do Norte decided it wanted to be a quick mover rather than wait until the last minute, the machinery manufacturer that supplies its drums worked with it to cage off the potentially problematic areas. Mezzanine-level gates in the cages gives easy access to each drum, but if a gate is left open, the drum will stop turning.

Because many of the bovine hides the tannery processes are from the famous Zebu breed of cattle, there is the perennial problem of the hump to deal with. Mr Barbosa is in no doubt that Brazilian machinery manufacturers have been able to adapt their technology more successfully to this peculiarity than their rivals in other parts of the world. For him, this shows itself most clearly when it comes to splitting: hides from the humped animals come out without the damage that conventional splitting machines often seem to cause.

The company has invested in Italian machinery, too, saying specifically that it likes the speed at which its Italian samming machine works and the extent to which it opens up the hides.  On the chemical side, Couro do Norte’s most successful collaboration so far has come from a project with one of the specialist international leather chemicals manufacturers. It’s a beamhouse system that uses enzyme technology to reduce by 67% the amount of sodium sulfide the tanner has to use.

Leather demand

These days, good suppliers of wet blue work in close co-operation with the customers who order their products and turn them into finished leather. The Barbosas know where their hides go and the market segments their customers are working in. Fábio Barbosa finds himself travelling very frequently, visiting these customers and discussing with them the way demand is moving. “We can look at automotive and furniture together on the one hand and at footwear and accessories together on the other,” he says. “Automotive and furniture account for 70% of our shipments at the moment, and shoes and accessories for just over 25%, with wet white making up the rest. So far in 2015, 25.9% of our hides have gone to customers here in Brazil, followed closely by China with 24.8% and Portugal with 22%. We are seeing a lot of growth in automotive and some in furniture too. It’s very clear to us that demand is strong among big automotive tanning groups because they come to us every month to audit us. We offer traceability back to the slaughterhouse to all customers, but in addition, the automotive companies want details about chrome, about pH and a series of other details. We know they need us because a lot of them no longer run their own beamhouses, preferring just to buy what they need when they need it.”

For clients in Japan, South Korea, Singapore and India as well as those in China, however, it would be hard to describe this as a just-in-time operation. The wet blue leaves the Belém tannery in containers for the port of Vila do Conde around 100 kilometres away for loading onto ships and transporting up to the Panama Canal and across the Pacific. With this, and the bureaucracy surrounding the letter-of-credit system, it can easily take four weeks for Couro do Norte hides to reach Asian customers’ facilities.

Mr Barbosa is certain leather content in athletic, casual and lower-priced shoes will continue to go down. “Away from the consumers who want to invest in top brands and high quality, it looks to me as though people don’t mind wearing plastic or textiles on their feet instead,” he comments.

He feels that if other industry bodies want to address this lack of appreciation for the uniqueness of leather, they should take a leaf out of CICB’s book. This organisation, the main national tanning industry body in Brazil, does a good job of promoting leather and protecting the material’s status. One initiative, called Lei do Couro, involves CICB moving around Brazil searching for examples of people misusing leather’s name by applying it, often with the doubly misleading prefix ‘eco-’, to shoes, accessories and other goods that are made from synthetic substitutes for leather. “There is nothing ‘eco’ about these synthetic materials,” the Couro do Norte managing director says. “It’s plastic.”
He would like to see greater collaboration with the meat industry in redressing unfair negative publicity that circulates about meat, leather and anything associated with raising livestock, especially in the Amazon regions of Brazil. An increase in slaughter levels is required, Mr Barbosa says, and for that to come about meat companies need to promote the positive aspects of their products so that tanners can do the same with leather. “We need each other because there is negative publicity everywhere,” he continues, “but consumers are not receiving correct information. Leather is not a dirty industry today, it’s a sustainable, high-tech industry. The petroleum industry on the other hand is a dirty industry. What would packers do with the hides they produce if there were no tanners? Sometimes you hear people say the material could all go to gelatin producers, but even if demand for gelatin were high enough to support that those companies will never be able to pay the price for hides that tanners can pay because they will never be able to add the value to hides that tanners can add.”

He has views on the situation in the Amazon too. Farmers who came north to settle in this part of Brazil a few generations ago were initially told to clear the trees: the government wanted them to clear the land and use it to produce food. Then, after campaigns from non-government organisations at the end of the last decade, packers, tanners and brands came under severe pressure to stop sourcing meat, hides or leather that had links to farms found guilty of illegal deforestation. “It’s gone way beyond that now,” says Mr Barbosa. “Farmers are now being asked to reforest high proportions of their land, depending on exactly where it is. It’s not uncommon now for farmers to have to devote 50% of their land to growing new trees, and it can take ten years to grow a tree here; if they fail to comply, no slaughterhouse will be permitted to take meat from that farm. The government passed a law in May 2012, which people can look up if they like (it’s law number 12651) imposing on farmers reforestation measures to counteract the previous deforestation. It’s the correct way; we think new trees are good, but the positive news never gets heard, just the bad news.”
Deforestation of the Amazon is world news; reforestation of the Amazon makes no waves at all. The Barbosa family runs a farm of its own on 2,000 hectares of land outside Belém. It keeps 1,500 head of cattle there and, while able try out ideas such as one to boost pasture growth using fertiliser that contains recovered hair from hides and solid waste from the tannery, it is subject to the same challenges as those who farm fields all over the north and north-west of the country.

Life and work

In all, 170 people work at Couro do Norte and most live nearby, many within walking distance of their place of employment. At the end of the working day, groups of workers often stay behind and play on a good-size (if not full-size) football pitch close to the tannery entrance. The tannery runs its own football championships, with eight teams that combine people from all departments competing against one another. The tournaments take place twice a year. The football field is in a pleasant location, just behind a line of jambo trees that form an avenue of shade between the entrance and the tannery itself. A specialist supplier put a weigh-bridge in the middle of this tree-lined road in 2005. It suggested the football pitch would make a much more suitable location, but Couro do Norte said no. It then said placing it on the road would make cutting down the trees essential, but the company stood its ground on this too and the trees remain. As well as shade, the trees provide red, peach-like jambo fruits in August and September, which the workers are fond of collecting. There are also mango and coconut trees and, at the extremity of the tannery grounds, some eucalyptus to help keep the air sweet-smelling for the local community.

Food for the workers matters to Couro do Norte. It has a practice of paying a food grant to its employees on top of their salaries. Human resources director, Leandro Barbosa, explains that if the company were to increase salaries instead of offering a food grant as a supplement to workers’ salaries, the tax burden would also increase, meaning the money would go less far for the employees. “Because we give it as a food grant, the tax stays the same,” he explains.
There is a school across the road from the tannery that, like most, has pupils of all ability on its roll. When Couro do Norte learned that the school authorities had no budget for remedial learning provision, the company decided, without making any noise about it, to pay for the learning support teacher, and now pupils who need extra help with reading, writing and counting have a specialist on hand to help them through catch-up classes that take place every day.
In an equally quiet and unassuming way, Couro do Norte also supports a local refuge, set up specifically to help girls aged from 10-15 who are under threat from or already are victims of sexual abuse. Rather than money, the support the tannery gives to the refuge is in the form of food and personal hygiene products. Leandro Barbosa, who has been to visit the centre, says Couro do Norte has been able to use its contacts in the meat industry to buy a whole cow and to have all the meat from it go to feed the girls and the people who look after them for weeks. The shelter, called Raio de Luz (Ray of Light), was opened in 1996 and is run by a not-for-profit organisation called CVC, which stands for Centro de Valorização da Criança (Centre for Recognising the Value of Children).

Fábio Barbosa agrees with his father that having so many members of his family work together is a good thing, but points out that the members of his family “have a real feeling for what we are doing here” and are involved because they love the leather business. He says people are what matter most to him, inside and outside of the company. “It’s not just about numbers,” he says. “Companies are made by people. We are who we are because of the people who work here and because our family has been doing this for generations. It’s in our blood.” His father, Marcelo Barbosa, says the industry gives him great enjoyment and that if he were starting all over again and could choose any area of business to go into, the leather industry would still be the one he would pick.

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