School of Sustainability

A Bristol tannery still takes months over a hide

Many cattle hides in Britain now end up shredded, fed into biodigesters or dumped in landfill. The leather industry that once converted them has all but vanished, undercut by cheaper synthetics and overseas manufacturing, and the tanneries went with it. The waste is one loss. The knock-on is quieter: hides were one of the things that made a small local abattoir viable, and the abattoirs were already closing.

At Thomas Ware and Sons in Bristol, the work carries on much as it did a century ago. Hides arrive from pasture-fed cattle and spend months with tannins drawn from vegetable matter - bark stripped from branches - rather than the chromium salts that do the industrial version of the job in days or weeks. The slower method costs more and employs people who actually know what they are doing, which is the point. It also cuts chromium ore mining out of the supply chain entirely.

British Pasture Leather has built a short chain around this: a network of pasture-based farms, a local abattoir, the Bristol tannery, and a buyer in Mulberry, which cuts and stitches the leather in its Somerset factories. Every hide is traceable back to the farm it came from. In Wiltshire, a farmer called Andy Rumming has gone a step further - he has his own beef cattle's hides tanned and runs on-farm workshops where people make their own shoes from them.

None of the farming behind this is novel. Native breeds on species-rich grassland, hay meadows, hedgerows: it is the older style of British cattle keeping, now asked to carry a premium hide as well as a beef carcass. Whether the revival holds depends on two unglamorous things - persuading buyers that craft tanning is a different product from industrial leather, and keeping enough small abattoirs open for the hides to be worth saving in the first place.

Sustainable Food Trust · Read the source