Background The leather industry consumes large volumes of water and chemicals. The chemicals used are mostly petrochemical-based, due to the easy availability of such materials and to their chemical stability. In accordance with the European Dangerous Substances Directive almost 31% of the volume of the chemicals used by the European leather industry are hazardous substances. Of those, 62% are used in Italy. The BREF (Best Available Techniques Reference) document and IPPC (integrated pollution prevention and control) Directive both highly recommend the reduction of water consumption in the leather making process, and the identification and use of efficient and sustainable non-hazardous substances and more environmentally-friendly products. Objectives The BIOPOL project aims to demonstrate the technical performance and economic viability of an innovative process for producing new biopolymers (‘green chemicals’) to be used in the tanning industry. These will be produced by recycling waste biomass from the related tanning process and agro-food industries. By doing so, the project is helping implement the EU directive on industrial emissions (IED), the BREF (Best Available Techniques reference) document, and REACH, which recommend that industry should decrease water consumption and the use of hazardous chemicals and pollutants such as heavy metals, formaldehyde, chromium, chlorinated paraffin, VOCs (volatile organic compounds) and inorganic salts. Specific objectives of the project are to: Design, construct and validate an innovative industrial pilot plant to treat and process animal waste biomass generated by the leather treatment process and vegetable biomass waste from the agro-food industry, thus implementing the concept of industrial symbiosis as foreseen by the EU Circular Economy Package; Produce new biopolymers, making them usable in tanning and fat-liquoring applications; Finalise quantitative assessment of the environmental impacts of the process, by applying the ‘product environmental footprint’ (PEF) method, and validating the cost and environmental effectiveness of the proposed new solution; and Assess quantitatively the environmental impact indicators in order to prove cost and environmental effectiveness of the proposed new solution. Expected results: An increase of waste biomass re-used by around 80-90%; Reductions of 70-90% in the hazardous substances normally found in conventional chemicals agents used in the tanning process; Reduction of the discharged leather-process effluents (namely, 20-30% of COD, 50-60% of inorganic sulphates and chlorides salts, 100% of Chromium III salts); Reactivity enhancement of the new biopolymers in the range of 30-40% when compared to the conventional leather application process; Reduction in the range of 20% of the water used in the leather process when compared to the conventional process; and Reduction in the range of 70-80% of the PEF of the new biopolymers when compared to the current tanning agents.