Richard Daniels entered the leather industry as a chemist, and then moved on to become a tanner. During the first half of his career he was directly responsible for all technical aspects of the production and manufacture for a full range of shoe upper leathers, in addition to being involved with special projects with a group of five tanneries. This tannery work mainly focused on implementing or improving recycling, effluent treatment, energy management and process rationalisation systems.

Richard was also responsible for the establishment of the first accredited quality control system in the leather industry – BS 5750 (ISO 9000)

Following this, Richard worked as a technical consultant with a number of private companies, governments and international organisations around the world.

This work encompassed hide and skin improvement, techno-economic studies, tannery rationalisations and surveys, counterpart training and environmental projects.

Richard has also worked as the technical editor of World Leather magazine, contributed to the development of reed-bed technology for tannery effluent treatment, created a series of text books, distanced learning modules, and worked within Universities lecturing on leather science and environmental management systems.

Currently Richard has been working on the development of a self-learning study for Technologists which will follow “Leather: an introduction” and “Making leather: An overview of manufacture”, the resources linked below, entitled “Making leather: the technology of manufacture”.