Sustainability

Staff and community

We want to be an excellent place to work. We provide a great deal of training to our employees ourselves, passing down the art and craft of leather making. We offer all our employees accident insurance and extensive occupational healthcare services, and our employee wellbeing and workplace ergonomics are regularly monitored by our occupational healthcare provider. We also offer our employees great recreational benefits.

We support a culture of doing things together and consider diversity to be our greatest asset. Transparency and collaboration across different cultures and partners come naturally to us. We employ people of several different nationalities and do business globally.

We want to play an active role in our community. We regularly sponsor local clubs and associations, and we also make a donation to a different nature conservation project every year.

We believe that genuinely ethical leather products are produced by happy and highly skilled employees in a safe working environment.

Green values and sustainable development

The life span of products made from real leather is much longer than that of products made from artificial leather. We are firm believers in maximising resource efficiency in all our work. We use energy, water and raw materials as efficiently and ecologically as possible in all our production. We also invest in new technology for our machinery and implement the principles of continuous improvement in our production design.

Leather can be tanned in many ways, the most common of which is chrome tanning. When done with great care and skill, this tanning method is safe for both workers and the environment. Vegetable tanning is a method that has been used for thousands of years, and getting it right requires an in-depth knowledge of this traditional craft. Combining the craft with modern production planning and control has allowed us to reduce our environmental footprint.

Ecological leather is the result of sustainable and environmentally friendly production.

SPECIFIC ACTIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE ENVIRONMENT

• We do not use coal or heavy oil. We endeavour to minimise energy consumption in all our activities.
• We collect and treat all water used in our production process in our own water treatment plant. Our work is subject to an environmental permit and is supervised by the local Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment, a governmental entity tasked with promoting regional competitiveness, well-being and sustainable development, along with helping curb climate change.
• We use only water-soluble finishing chemicals, and all the chemical substances we use are REACH compliant.
• We use eco-labelled and biodegradable packing materials whenever possible.
• We collect all our organic sludge and solid waste, both of which are converted into biogas in a nearby facility. The biogas from our waste powers biogas-fuelled vehicles to provide a total of almost 200,000 greener kilometres, reducing the use of fossil fuel. The carbon dioxide emissions of biogas as a traffic fuel are calculated to be zero, just like those of other renewable fuels.
• We make purchases from local businesses whenever possible.
• We compensate for our environmental impact with our own carbon sink: the forest land that we own. How we manage the forest land we own is one of our contributions to preserving the environment.

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