Nothing to Hide: Leather and the circular economy

摘要

For years, Dr Gunler Pauli's main aim has been to find ingenious entrepreneurial ideas that use, in the most sustainable way possible, resources that we already have around us.Projects that Dr Pauli has worked on have created millions of jobs, with a critical added bonus of circulating the money from workers' wages within local communities, often in poor parts of the world. He says these examples merely "scratch the surface" of what is possible in the Blue Economy.There is great potential in "regenerating a culture of artisans" all over the world, he argues, using easily accessible natural materials to create value.The leather industry is part of this picture and can proudly point to its longstanding history of making use of waste from another industry (the meat sector), adding very high levels of value to it to create a beautiful, desirable and highly versatile material. It creates jobs and alleviates a potentially serious waste management problem at the same time. It is one of the most circular industries on the planet.