HOW TO RINSE HIDES OF SALT: BEFORE TANNING

DE-SALINATING HIDES
 

What to Know:

• Salt is essential for human nutrition + our nerve and muscle function - but it is toxic to plants

  • Salt prevents nitrogen uptake in plants, which inhibits growth and reproduction

  • It will just straight up kill plants, especially in dry environments like grasslands where there isn't much moisture in the ground to dilute the presence of salt

• Once a precious + sought-after resource, salt is now abundantly available due to industrial supply chains - which has disrupted the earth's under-studied but integral {global salt cycle}

  • The everyday use of salt in “irrigation, de-icing roads, mining, wastewater treatment, and even the use of salt-laden household items like detergent” is too much for the earth's carrying capacity, leading to the salinization of vast tracts of land {source here}

• As hide tanners, let's be grateful for the access to a rare commodity that is essential to our work. And let's be frugal in its use + attentive in its disposal, so that we can be light on the land.

How to De-salinate a hide

Step 1

• Carefully unwrap your salted hide

• Shake off excess salt into a tote

• Dispose of this somewhere safe: I shake the salt off in a gravel yard where no plants grow and then hose the area off

Step 2

• The hide will now have the remaining stubborn sal that adhered to the skin. It will need to be dissolved in water, which breaks salt down into its component parts sodium and chloride, which releases the hold it has on skin

• Place the hide into a tote and fill the tote with cold water. Let it sit fully submerged for 1-3 hours if you intend to keep the hair on; let sit for up to 24 hours if you will scrape the grain off; let sit for several days if you're making grain-on rawhide.

• The salt will now be dissolved and the hide will be fully rehydrated.

Step 3

• Move on to hidework. Don't let a rehydrated hide (especially a sheepskin) sit around for long. The hair can start to slip out from the follicles and create bald patches.

• At this point, I wash my woolly sheepskins if they weren't already washed prior to salting.  it's a good way to make use of the water that is already being employed for desalinating.

Step 4

• Dispose of the salt in a safe place, again: away from plants and tree roots. This could be  gravel area or a drain pipe.  if you tan a lot of hides, you will eventually need to develop a dead zone or a literal hole dug in the ground in your beamhouse yard that is designated for drainage/salination/tannin disposal.  A small area that consistently takes on the minor effluence of natural hide tanning is a good way to go, compared to randomly saturating a wide area with introduced substances that mess with pH and salt cycles.