The number of countries that have put in place formal legislation to protect the identity of leather continues to grow, writes Leatherbiz.

Portugal’s leather law came into force at the start of 2022 and, as a new article in the forthcoming August-September issue of World Leather will make clear, the Portuguese leather industry says it wants to share the working document from which this law was fashioned with colleagues in other countries to let them adapt the text to the needs of the industry in their own parts of the world.

Brazil’s leather law has been in place since 1965 and the South American country’s national tanning industry body, CICB, has said the law is still helping it protect consumers from “companies that try to piggyback on the attributes of leather while using synthetic materials in the composition of their products”.

CICB monitors social media to make sure terms that refer to leather are being used correctly. It has said that in recent years it has had to notify the authorities of more than 80,000 infractions.