Holidays, rain hamper leather production

Hathoon Sheriffdeen

LEATHER: May is a dark month for the leather industry in Sri Lanka. Many leather tanneries are closed during the holiday period and leather sheet production slows down during this period. Five to six tanneries are functioning out of 12 tanneries available in Sri Lanka due to various reasons, the General Manager for Ceylon Leather Products, Sanadha Witharana told the Daily News.

Apart from the holidays a higher rainfall recorded for the last three days is another reason for the slow down in the productivity of the leather industry.

‘May is a dark month for the industry. So we didn’t lose due to the rainy season. But there can be enough since the industry is involved in wet-end and drying processes in its production, Witharana said.

‘We have lost 90 per cent of our industry’s budgeted production during this period. The three tanneries I’m in charge recorded 6000 square feet of leather sheets per day, which is 10 per cent of our total production capacity. The actual production we managed to grasp was only Rs 450,000 during this period, he said.

When Daily News spoke to one of the partners of a smallscale leather producer, Standard Leather Company, S. Balakrishnan he was of the same view.

He said the drying process of the hides and skins are affected during the rainy seasons.

This is one of the important stages in the reprocessing of leather sheets in tanneries.

“We had fungus formations on the hides and skins on these three days and we were forced to dump those hides and skins in garbage, which is a unbearable loss for our tannery.”

“The leather industry in Sri Lanka is very inferior due to various reasons. We don’t have sufficient standards to protect the hides and skins. The technology of skinning the cows and goats should be introduced and butchers should be educated on that issue as well” Witharana said.

“We don’t have proper animal husbandry to skin healthy hides and skins from cows and goats respectively. Lot of branding of animals lead to poor quality hides and skins, he said. Hides and skins are by-products of the meat industry.

Since slaughtering animals is an environmental issue, it affects the leather industry as well.