Conceria Alaska tannery is a company in the Leather sector. Since 1969 world leader in leather production, the first to work with Indian buffalo, and since 2000 until today characterized by a complex and high-quality process for full and half calve hides. Our products are mostly used by the Italian fashion industry for handbags and shoe manufacturing.
Alaska tannery is certificated LWG since 2018 and in 2021 it’s one of the founding members of the Sustainable Leather Foundation with a goal to provide a transparent approach, inclusive, and holistic to sustainability for the leather supply chain. This for us was not enough and we wanted to go further so in 2021 the tannery changed its legal company statute and became the first tannery to be Società Benefit.
This means that we embraced sustainability in our mission and every year together with a financial report, we have to present an impact report. Benefit companies are for-profit corporate entities that aim to balance out their profit-making purposes with the objectives of transparency, sustainability, and the mission of having a positive impact on the environment.
Benefit companies shall operate in a responsible, sustainable, and transparent manner vis-à-vis individuals, communities, territories and the environment, cultural and social heritage, entities and associations as well as all other stakeholders As of today, Alaska is part of a group of around 950 companies, the only one as Tannery We have decided to undertake this path even because the digital and green actions are becoming more and more fundamental pillars to guarantee the competitiveness of the leather industry which is characterized by high craftsmanship.
The commitment to create a sustainable industry passes through major economic and organizational investments and the upgrading of human resources. Today the leather supply chain is able to measure and quantify the environmental impact of its actions and process so consequently is able to implement those improvement actions that the market requires.
For this reason, we decided to create a partnership between Conceria Alaska and We Are with the project called Leath3R that wants to respond to the challenges that the market requires: efficiency, transparency, traceability, digitization, to start a real transition.
Leath3R is an end-to-end solution that, through a supply chain traceability solution, verifies with data all the leather production steps starting from the origin of the slaughterhouse to the finished product. Only by tracing and measuring the impact of the entire production chain with the object to obtain data, we can start to do the improvement actions and keep them under control with measurable data.
All this complex and technical data will be transformed into an easy language for consumer communication through hangtags to be applied in the final product.
Through the use of a technological platform, we associate a unique tag to each skin through the QR technology which, in addition to identifying the product itself, wants to create a digital identity with all the information relating to the history of the product. Furthermore, Leath3R does not stop at mere measurement to offer data for continuous improvement planning, but through specific algorithms provided by a third company, it calculates the environmental impact in CO2 of the transport of the goods shipped to customers and automatically transmits reforestation orders to partners selected that give evidence of this action that provides, in turn, the digital traceability of the trees planted.
Compensating the CO2 emission OF the transportation for us is not enough. For this reason, we have a reforestation program that has multi-benefits:
- Environmental benefits: through the Neutralization of the CO2 emission we improve the air quality;
- Biodiversity benefits: We help to regenerate the forests;
- Social benefits: The tree planted are grown by local communities and thanks to this they will have an increased family revenue;
- Hunger Benefits: the trees generated over the years will be left to the local communities.
All this information and actions described then will be reworked and transformed into concepts easily understandable by the consumers by creating flyers and hangtags that contain the digital link of the off-setting operations and contain the sustainability information of the supply chain involved and the product.
Leath3R is one of the projects that we have decided to undertake in the tannery because it allows us to have specific impact data and so we are able to do all the necessary improvements actions to have a production chain more efficient and traceable.
This work has been financially supported by the European ELIIT initiative, a project funded by the COSME Programme of the European Union for the competitiveness of Enterprises and Small & Medium-Sized Enterprises(SMEs).
what’s more;
Day by day we are improving our activities to have a less environmental impact:
- Renewable Energy
- Recycled Packaging
- Cooperation with profit and no-profit organizations
- Reforestation
- Traceability
- Transparency
- Impact measurement
- Benefit Corporation
These are the activities we are daily doing and many others are under development.
I want to say thanks for your time, I hope to be able to transfer to you our tannery identity and where we want to go in the future. What I like to say at the end of every single presentation is :
Are you ready to start your journey with us?
