Here we go again: shortly after responding to the Guardian, Kerry Senior (director of UK Leather) finds himself having to respond to another British generalist media. This time it’s BBC, which on September 10th released a piece on alternative materials for fashion entitled “The bizarre fabrics that fashion is betting on”.
What’s wrong
From ILM digital columns, the director of the association that represents UK tanning industry feels compelled to report on “a certain number of inaccuracies written about leather”. Which ones? For example, the usual ambiguity about its relationship with the meat industry: “Cattle are not bred for leather manufacturing – he writes -. On the contrary, tanning uses a by-product, that would otherwise simply be discarded as waste”. But Kerry Senior clarifies other things: “Green materials are not available in the necessary volumes, therefore synthetic pollutant deriving from oil is the remaining alternative to leather”.
Clarifying for everybody
As on the nature of leather, on its circularity and on the dynamics of the tanning process there is a lot of confusion, the Austrians of Boxmark Leather intervened in the debate with an explanatory video. In social slang, it would be called “an explanation”. The publishing platform, YouTube, is the most accessible of all: we hope it will reach a large number of people.
