China Supplier Italianism 1.0-3.0mm Thickness Vegetable Tanned Top Layer Cowhide Leather For Sale

China Supplier Italianism 1.0-3.5 Mm Thickness Vegetable Tanned Top Layer Cowhide Leather For Sale

How is Vegetable-tanned Leather is Made?

• The process starts when the animal is slaughtered at a slaughterhouse. The meat is taken away for processing, and the hides are quickly salted. If you don’t salt the hide and keep it moist, it will start to rot, and once it starts rotting, it is over. The rotting destroys the grain, which is arguably the most important part of leather. There is no way to reverse that kind of damage, and very little can be salvaged into good leather. When the preserved hides arrive at the tannery, they are placed in a beam-house. The beam-house is the storage facility for the green hides.

• From there the hides are put in a liming pit, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is a pit, or in modern times a drum, full of lime, and we aren’t talking about the fruit. Lime is a very potent chemical, and burns the hair off the hides. In the old days, the tanneries were built on a river so they could dump the old used up lime into the river. Eventually the rivers were so full of lime, that the government shut down the majority of the tanneries in the United States.
• Very few remain to this day. The rest of the tanning process is pretty straightforward. The hides are pickled, put in another drum of tannin(the tree bark extract) to be tanned, pressed, sorted, and dyed. If you want a more in depth view at the ins and outs of vegetable tanning, you can check out the video of a production process in Italy below.

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