At a session held on Tuesday 19 December at the Adoberia Bella, Leather Cluster Barcelona, together with the A3 Leather Innovation Center (Universitat de Lleida), presented SULEAP, a vocational training cooperation project between different European partners.

This education and skills development project began in November 2021 and is funded by the European Commission’s Erasmus+ programme. Throughout all these months, a consortium of nine partners from countries with active leather production, including Spain, Poland, Italy, Greece and Turkey, has been working on the project.

With the participation of the A3 Leather Innovation Center of the Universitat de Lleida and under the leadership of the Centro Tecnológico das Industrias do Couro (CTIC, Portugal), the organisations from these countries have worked with the aim of broadening knowledge about the implementation of sustainability in the leather industry among target groups and society at large, using innovative training tools and platforms.

All the project partners intend to act as multiplying agents and as a bridge between the most advanced knowledge, industry and society, supporting the transformation of the leather sector towards a more modern and competitive industry.

During the SULEAP project presentation session at the Adoberia Bella, Anna Bacardit, director of the A3 Leather Innovation Center UdL, set out the context, purpose and outcome of more than two years of work, including the preparation of a MOOC open to companies and society on sustainability in the leather sector on a multilingual platform. MOOC is the acronym for Massive Online Open Courses. In other words, it is a distance-learning course, accessible over the internet, that anyone can sign up for and which has no limit on the number of participants.

Leather Cluster Barcelona is an environment of competitive cooperation for promoting cross-cutting, transformative strategic projects with the aim of driving forward the ecosystem of the Catalan leather sector. The cluster is an accredited body within the Catalonia Clusters programme and has the support of Acció.