Be.trace: how to trace leather in the tannery

In recent months, under strong pressure from brands and certification bodies, more and more companies are recognizing how to guarantee the traceability of leathers is essential in the tanning process.

For ethical purposes, traceability requires that each leather can be recognized as coming from a farm and from a subsequent ethical slaughter. Unfortunately, this translates into an additional industrial cost for the tanning industry. With the BE.TRACE technology, traceability becomes instead of a cost, a strength of the tanning company. This is proved by a recent installation made in Europe at a group that has long used the meat traceability system for its farms and which, thanks to BE.TRACE, has obtained industrial traceability in the tannery.

But how does it work?

Even before starting the tanning process in the tannery, the hides are uniquely coded by laser technology. Then the classic phases of the wet process follow . After tanning, at the exit from the press, the Selevision scans the leather in three dimensions and, at the same time, the BE.TRACE system recognizes the code and combines it with the measured data.

All the information can therefore be analyzed as a batch or as a single hide and thus, in addition to ethical traceability, we therefore obtain industrial traceability.

What does it mean?

Every single leather, in addition to having the history of its origin, carries with it its industrial history. By associating the code of each leather with the parameters measured along the production process, it will be possible to obtain data referring to the single leather and evaluate the influence that each phase has exerted on it.

Hence, the same leather in the wet blue state can be evaluated with its measured data also in the crust stage as well as in the finishing stage, when it is ready to be delivered to the final customer.

With a view to maximum flexibility, BE.TRACE has been developed to recognize multiple types of codes and this allows its use within many processing stages.

The merit of this tannery is to be the forerunner in industrial traceability thanks to BE.TRACE.

With the help of data, it will be able to develop its know-how in the processing of traditional leathers, combining methods with modern technologies to obtain the maximum efficiency of the process from every single leather produced.