The paper discusses the issue of tannery sewage sludge management as one of the barriers in reaching sustainable development in the tanning industry. The Authors present the main characteristics, and its origins, of tannery sludge limiting the possibilities of their treatment and review the proposed solutions found in literature. The paper focuses on identifying the strong and weak points of the most commonly used methods used for sewage sludge treatment as well as presents some novel approaches which remain at laboratory stage.