A hide arrives as one irregular piece and leaves as several dozen regular ones. The difference between those two states is offcut, and what a factory does with it says more about how it is run than most sustainability pages do.

The first answer is yield

The cheapest waste is the waste never created. Better nesting, tighter grading and cutting sizes in the right sequence all shrink the pile before any recycling question arises, which is why the cutting room is the first place to look and not the bins behind it.

The greenest offcut is the one that was never cut.

Workers at a long bench sorting cut tan leather panels beside stacked hides.
Panels nested and stacked: yield decided at the table

Sorting, because mixed waste has no value

Leather, textile, foam, board and general waste are separated at source, in the room where each is produced. Mixed into one bin they are landfill; kept apart they are material somebody else can use — small leather pieces for accessories and craft, board and paper into the recycling stream, and the rest handled by licensed collectors.

What we do not claim

We do not publish a diversion rate or a carbon figure, because we do not currently measure either to a standard we would be willing to defend. What we can show a visiting buyer is the sorting, the records that go with the collectors, and the yield figures per programme. Numbers we have not measured are not numbers we will print.

Three colleagues at a packing bench, bagging finished uppers.
Finished uppers bagged at the packing bench

When we can measure something properly, we will publish it. Until then, the offer is a walk through the rooms where the waste is actually made.

Written by
The Nhật Minh team
Filed under
Sustainability
Published
13 January 2026