How JBS is reshaping the leather industry with Kind Leather

The leather industry is undergoing a real transformation with the advancement of Kind Leather, a brand developed by JBS Couros that focuses on the material’s entire life cycle. Created seven years ago, Kind Leather adopts circular economy principles to reduce waste and optimize the use of natural resources, balancing efficiency and environmental responsibility.

Unlike the traditional model, which prioritizes volume and maximizing production, the concept developed by JBS Couros proposes an approach focused on quality and making the best use of raw materials. This means rethinking the production process to minimize environmental impacts and reinforce more sustainable practices without compromising the industry’s profitability.

“The launch of Kind Leather was a milestone in our journey to transform the leather industry, bringing more income to our customers, transparency in the process through traceability and reduced environmental impact. Now, with the change in stance, we are going beyond the new visual identity: we are betting on a brand that proposes a light and transparent dialog with the consumer and that brings increasingly responsible solutions to our process, considering not only our industry, but also our stakeholders,” says Guilherme Motta, president of JBS Couros.

The idea for Kind Leather arose as a response to the growing global demand for sustainable solutions in the industry. By adopting Kind Leather, JBS Couros sought not only to innovate in the manufacture of leather, but also to set a new standard for the entire production chain, proposing environmental and social solutions at every stage of production.

In the old models of leather production, on one side there was a company from industries such as clothing, footwear or furniture. Each of them would take a piece of leather, which was sold in a standard format, and cut it up for use in a specific product – a shoe, a jacket or an armchair seat, for example.

This way of organizing the chain, despite apparently making perfect sense, had a problem: it generated a lot of waste. The solution? An engineering project to deliver products to customers that are as close as possible to its use – a leather with a higher cutting yield – while reducing waste.

“Kind Leather breaks this purely transactional logic in favor of a concern for how this material is used,” says Kim Sena, Sustainability Director at JBS Couros.

The result: an average increase of 9% in the customer’s yield on leather. In the case of JBS Couros, sending the customer a product with less waste means greater generation of raw material, which would otherwise have become waste, so it can be used in other JBS Novos Negócios companies, such as Genu-in, which produces 12,000 tons of collagen and gelatine a year, and Orygina, which uses collagen to supply products for the pharmaceutical industry, research centers and other markets.

There are environmental gains: Kind Leather can reduce carbon emissions by just over 15% compared to leather in its regular format.

“Since the concept of Kind Leather was created, we have been perfecting ourselves to achieve better ways of cutting leather to serve customers in various sectors,” says Sena. “The results achieved have been very good, but Kind Leather is much more than optimizing leather cutting,” says Sena. According to the Sustainability Director at JBS Couros, Kind Leather is a “channel for creating solutions for the entire leather chain”.

In this new phase, Kind Leather now has three new axes: sustainable livestock farming, reducing the environmental impact of leather and maximizing co-production, and increasing the use of the leather area. And it operates on four pillars: support for rural producers (encouraging the use of tools to make production more sustainable); analysis of the production chain (based on the use of technologies to optimize production); smart shape (to optimize the use of leather); and traceability (to guarantee the use of raw materials from ethical and sustainable sources).

One of the recent developments is the SaveTan program, which reduces the use of water and chemicals in the leather production process. This program reduces the carbon footprint of leather tanning by up to 12%.

Another project is Responsible Tannery Chemistry (RTC), a protocol for technically and standardly evaluating JBS Couros suppliers according to four sustainability criteria: biodegradability, restricted substances, presence of biogenic carbon and overall environmental impact. “Our goal is to retrain the sector, induce producers to adopt the most sustainable practices and show that the leather industry can be a leader in the challenges and opportunities of low-impact materials,” says Sena.