A joint project that aims to improve the quality of lambskins in Spain will continue.

SELAMBQ (Spanish Entrefino Lambskin Quality) involves leather, meat and livestock organisations in Spain, France and Italy. It launched in 2017, co-financed by the European Union, to address a drop in quality of Entrefino lambskins that specialist tanners had noticed with increasing frequency over the last ten years or so.

Led by a research team from the University of Zaragoza, it has mapped and analysed defects on the skins of hundreds of thousands of lambs, allowing leather industry organisations to work with livestock and meat companies on a programme of improvements.

Improvements likely to come out of SELAMBQ include measures to improve flooring in buildings in which farmers provide shelter for Entrefino lambs as a means of avoiding certain skin conditions. Better flaying practices in slaughterhouses to reduce the problem of grain breaks is another possible. These measures will reduce the numbers of lambskins that have to be discarded rather than processed into valuable leather.

Project partners have now announced that they had to abandon “certain objectives” owing to covid-19 restrictions; for example, it became impossible to offer external parties access to abattoirs. Nevertheless, they have succeeded in gathering “sufficient statistical intelligence” on other aspects of the project to be able to take it forward.

They have pointed out that high-quality Entrefino lambskins have sustained a high level of demand in spite of covid-19.

Organisations involved in SELAMBQ include tanners Riba-Guixa, Inpelsa, Colomer and Bosch Girona in Spain, Russo di Casandrino in Italy and Mégisserie Richard, Bodin-Joyeux and Alric in France. They have said they remain committed to combining their efforts with those of suppliers to maintain and enhance “the extraordinary legacy of Entrefino lambskin leather for the leather industry, for customers in the luxury sector and for the satisfaction of demanding consumers”.

Image: Riba Guixà