By Jocelyn Fitzgerald, AILO Florence
The first thing most people who come to Florence want to buy is a new leather handbag, preferably a designer bag or one from a luxury fashion brand, a pair of beautiful shoes or a pair of soft leather gloves. There is a reason for this. Florence is home to the most talented leather artisans in the world, who in turn have access to the best tanneries, designers and metal hardware to decorate the finished goods. There is really something very special about the shoes, handbags, wallets, leather clothes and gloves produced in Italy.
Florence has also been chosen by many famous fashion brands to make their exquisite collections: Gucci, Ferragamo, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Fendi to mention a few. The highly qualified artisans made it the natural choice for the excellence required from luxury brands.
Most of the leather used to make the finished products comes from the nearby tanneries in Santa Croce. Some are tanned using natural vegetable-based dyes; others are tanned to a fine finish using metal-based agents. No flaws are tolerated in the luxury leather category. Therefore, discards or off-cuts can be as high as 60%. The off-cuts and waste from the vegetable tanned leathers can be sold on as fertilizer or disposed of biologically. The chrome-tanned discards present more of a problem: these cannot be used as fertilizer nor broken down ecologically. This is toxic waste which inevitably used to result in scraps being burned or buried in landfills.
The local rules governing the waste from leather goods are now very strict, and ecological guards roam the factories to make sure these rules are followed. The waste bins in the factories are divided into ecologically tanned leather, black leather and colored leather. The off-cuts are then disposed of according to their tanning category. Sometimes coloured off-cuts can be stripped back to their natural state to be used again. Solutions are constantly being explored to contain toxic waste and the reuse of the off-cuts.
One admirable example of extending the life of off-cuts is Zerolab, a working hub for emerging designers, artisans and startups, which has embraced the circular economy. Zerolab originated from the need to reduce waste generated by local leather and textile industries while encouraging emerging young artisans to create beautiful new products from the discarded scraps. Zerolab has contracts with the luxury leather accessory factories to collect the unused strips and off-cuts of chrome-based leather to reuse and produce new products. This effort is a huge contribution to the ecology of Tuscany. They join other initiatives to find ways to diminish the estimated 180 tons of leather disposed of as “toxic waste” every year. Zerolab also runs workshops for individuals, groups, schools and colleges so that students get a hands-on experience of what it is like to be a leather artisan.
One of Zerolab’s co-founders is Cassandra Kane, a sustainable design consultant who has worked in the luxury leather industry in New York and in Florence. Cassandra was shocked by the amount of waste generated in this field and decided to do something about it.
She is passionate about the environment and wants to do her bit to reduce the toxic waste that inevitably leads to the destruction of nature and arable land. The more waste she can turn into new products the happier she is. The student artisans, by working on projects, also experience this commitment and, faced with the situation of only having a finite amount of available materials at their disposal, often become even more creative in their designs.
This is the challenge: how does one maintain high quality production, which inevitably leads to high levels of “scraps,” while respecting our planetary limitations? Florentine artisans have already adopted many laudable actions such as utilizing vegetable tans when feasible, separating cut-offs into easily identifiable bins, re-tanning and recycling natural dyed scraps as described above. We hope these efforts will flourish and continue to expand and that recycling hubs will also attract more support. That said, there is already a tradition of recycling and reusing in Tuscany. The traditional Florentine mentality is to purchase good quality – and make it last. The “disposable” habits of cheap clothes and accessories have caught on, but to a lesser degree than elsewhere. Therefore, the disappointingly short length of use discourages many local consumers from purchasing cheap garments.
Prato is a town near to Florence with a renowned history of textile recycling. They have been recycling fabrics since the Middle Ages, when the fine gowns of the Renaissance were not affordable for everyone. As the saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of all inventions.” The local population took this saying to heart, thereby inventing a cottage industry making new fabrics from the discarded gowns.
It follows, therefore, that the location for recycling and reusing leather discards from the luxury fashion industry in Tuscany should be Florence, and that a sustainable and circular economy be given the importance it deserves. More and more of us are aware that careless disposal of toxic waste creates pollution and want to protect our planet from further climate warming and disastrous weather conditions.
We can all play our part, by searching out and supporting initiatives in our area which are working towards this aim, to :
- Eliminate waste and pollution
- Circulate products and materials at their highest value
- Regenerate what has been taken from nature
- Reuse, Retrieve, Recycle everything and anything.
All photos by the author.
