Abstract

It would be hard to find a stage in leather manufacture where polyurethanes or their starting products have not yet been tried out. To the scientist, the term “polyurethanes” means, first of all, a variable system which is easy to modify, so that the polymer can be “tailor made” to meet specific demands, while to those who are chiefly practically minded a few negative aspects will occur, such as pot life, non-aqueous solvents, and vessels that are hard to clean. But this versatile class of polymers must have quite a number of points to its credit—or else it could not be put to so many different uses in leather manufacture. Several examples are reviewed in this paper.