Retanning Agent with the brand name “X-Biomer”: award in the category “Environmentally-friendly products”.

Lanxess has been honoured with the 2017 German Innovation Award for Climate and the Environment.  State Secretary at Ministry for Environment Jochen Flasbarth adn Holger Losch, Deputy Director General of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), presented the award to Luis Lopez-Remon, head of the Leather business unit (BU LEA) in the course of a formal event in Berlin on February 22, 2018.

Lanxess received the award in the category “Environmentally-friendly products and services” for an innovative technology developed for the recycling of residues from the leather manufacturing process.  Under the title “Resource-efficient production of leather chemicals”(ReeL), the specialty chemicals company collaborated with the research institute INVITE from Leverkusen on the realisation of a concept for a modular plant for the production of a retanning agent with the brand name “X-Biomer” from leather offcuts, trimings and shavings, up unitl now generally a waste product for disposal, and plant-based biomass.

Resource-efficient production

The innovative plant can be operated on-site in tanneries.  “The award clearly confirms that we are on the right, as sustainable, path with our resource-efficient production of leather chemicals.  With this innovation project, we want to show that production residues form the leather manufacturing process can be recycled on site in tanneries and that we can significantly improve the sustainability profile of the leather manufacturing industry,” said López-Remón at the official award ceremony.  Because, it is much more efficient in comparison with the traditional production of retanning agents in production facilities far away from the tanneries.

Tanneries would be able to produce their own retanning agents.

In this way, a tannery would be able to automatically and largely independently produce a part of its own needs for retanning agents like those offered by LANXESS in its X-Bipomer range.  “This project is a very promising step towards an even more sustainable production concept,” explained Dietrich Tegtmeyer, initiator and head of the project at LANXESS.  “While on the one han, ‘on-site’ and ‘just in time’ production brings enormous savings of resources in terms of energy, logistics, and packaging, on the other hand, by-products like shavings containing collagen can be utilised as a raw material for the production of the retanning chemicals required.