Abstract

Leather production yields emissions to water, land and air – all of which are increasingly subjected to legislative control. Furthermore, safety for employees within the work place has to be ensured. Compliance with this increasingly complex regulatory system precludes single objective approaches. Environmental auditing is a systematised approach to identifying the problems within a particular sector or production unit. To ensure that the leather industry can effectively reduce its environmental impact, BLC is co-ordinating two international projects to provide reliable information on the real, as distinct from claimed, status of Clean Technologies applicable to this sector. Monitoring of the work place and its emissions makes analytical demands beyond the scope of traditional tannery laboratories and recent developments will be reported.