Greenwashing and regulatory avoidance in the leather industry

The trade associations manage their public image with the greatest care, and often through aggressive strategies.

There is a strange mixture that marks the leather-processing industry in Italy, a mixture of the ancient and the hypermodern, of a deep provincial parochialism and a global vocation. This is an industrial sector that transforms raw or semi-processed hides bought abroad in order to turn them into leather suited to the tastes of the market: they pass them through large drums filled with a liquid based on trivalent chromium, or more rarely on vegetable tannin, for the hides to stabilize; they are then given the properties customers require, for the production of shoes (soles and uppers), clothing accessories, garments, furniture or car interiors.

The main production hubs are Arzignano, in the province of Vicenza, and Santa Croce sull’Arno, in Tuscany. The first works with more highly technological and standardized processes, and deals mainly with the automotive and furniture sectors. The second is a district made up of smaller firms specializing in footwear and leather goods. It is in the province of Pisa, but oriented towards Florence and the high-fashion industry, the key reference point that gives shape to products and trends.

Two thirds of the finished leather is sold abroad, for a total turnover of more than €4 billion a year. According to figures supplied by the national tanning-industry association UNIC, in 2025 there were 877 firms in the sector, with a combined workforce of 17,445. The current figures show a sector in difficulty, which has nonetheless shown itself able to overcome even the toughest of circumstances,........

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