Böle Tannery

Natural

Our tanning process utilizes only natural ingredients – primarily spruce bark and water. Both these ingredients are renewable in our immediate geographical surroundings – they virtually regenerate outside the footsteps of our facilities. The amount of water we use is actually very limited, since we never empty our vats but only refill them to compensate for evaporation.

That also means that we use no synthetic ingredients or chemicals. One benefit of this is that we don’t need to handle any dangerous waste. Another benefit is that we don’t need to use a lot of water to dilute or wash out the synthetic ingredients.

We generate a minimum of waste – primarily some hide residues and used bark. This waste is quickly biodegradable. Hide residues can either be used as ingredient for gelatine (wet hide residues) or as a bio-fuel (dry hide residues). The used bark can be immediately nurtured back to the forest as a 100 % natural waste, or dried to use for heating.

Our processes require a very small amount of energy. We don’t heat water in the process and our use of heavy machinery is limited. Most of the energy actually comes from the manual labour in our tannery and sadlery. Read all about how we work in our tannery and sadlery.

We create almost no emissions into air or water, since we have no combustion or heated processes, nor use any synthetic ingredients. As for the smell sometimes created by tanneries, any owner of a Böle will testify that the scent of our tannery inherited in our products is actually a pleasure to the nose.