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The Central Leather Research Institute (CLRI) has developed a technology to make leather-like products using mango pulp; it licensed the technology to a Mumbai-bases start-up, Aamati Green Pvt Ltd on Tuesday.
Aamati Green intends to put up a plant with a capacity of 30,000 square meters a month, which would be raised to 50,000 sqm a month later. The plant is to come up near Mumbai. The raw materials will be sourced from the mango belt of Ratnagiri.
Pratik Dadhania, Founder, Aamati Green, told businessline that typically about a third of the produce goes waste—the waste is the company’s raw material. Going forward, the company will produce leather-like products from wasted pineapple and apple pulp too.
The manufacturing involves adding a commercially available biopolymer to the pulp and processing it under “certain conditions”. All parts of the fruit, except the seed, are used to make the pulp. The process uses a negligible amount of water.
As for the products, which can be made into wallets, bags, and handbags, “we are better than our global peers.” Also, using discarded fruits provides farmers a new source of income.
Though CLRI developed this technology, the idea itself is not new. There are a few companies abroad that make leather-like stuff—vegan leather—from fruits. Notable among them is Fruitleather, based in Rotterdam. Content put out by Fruitleather shows that the pulp is mixed with additives, spread out as sheets, and then dried. A chemical is used to give a thin coat to give the stuff a glossy appearance. An embossing machine makes it look exactly like animal leather.
P Thanikaivelan, Chief Scientist and Head—Advanced Materials Laboratory, CLRI, who was involved in the development of mango-leather, told businessline that the leather-like material would not replace leather, but would compete with ‘synthetic leather’ (made with materials like PVC and polyurethane).
Since CLRI’s development of the product was sponsored by Aamati Green, the license to the start-up is exclusive. However, CLRI has developed similar leather-like material from rice and wheat straw, Thanikaivelan said. The technology is still available for licensing.
Bacterial cellulose
Apart from fruits, another way of producing leather-like materials is by using bacteria. As businesslinereported on March 19, global research is now focused on the genetic engineering of organisms such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Komagataeibacter rhaeticus to produce leather-like material that have a natural black color.
CLRI scientist Debasis Samanta has worked on a combination of bacterial leather and polyurethane, “immobilising” PU in bacterial leather.
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