Essay twelve: The carbon footprint of leather
The carbon footprint of leather: a drawn-out debate
Debate on how best to calculate and communicate the carbon footprint of leather rages on. This essay tracks the main points of the long-running dispute over which aspects of the leather and livestock supply chains should (and should not) form part of the calculations.
The European Commission supports green products and green industries and has said it wants consumers to have confidence that products claiming to be green really do have a minimal impact on the environment, a low carbon footprint. In 2013, the European Commission invited stakeholders in a number of sectors to help it develop agreed methods for measuring environmental performance. The leather industry was one of those that volunteered to take part; its representative body in the European Union, COTANCE, identified this as a good way to gain recognition of leather as a green product and also for the global leather industry to achieve agreement on a disputed issue: what proportion of the carbon footprint of livestock in the upstream supply chain should apply to finished leather?
Because other industries have to wrestle with the same question, the Commission asked representatives of the leather, meat, dairy, animal feed and pet food sectors to work together to agree “system boundaries” in the cattle value chain and establish how best to share environmental responsibilities. Agreeing “system boundaries” means defining which processes must be included and which excluded in determining the product environmental footprint (PEF) of the diverse materials and by-products involved. PEF is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)-based method of quantifying the environmental impacts of products, goods or services. PEF sets a basis for comparing one product to another, helping consumers decide which is more sustainable. The guiding principle is that a fair comparison is only possible if the results are based on the same product category rules (PCRs).
Weidema’s and Brugnoli’s work
This was far from the first time the leather industry had attempted to address this question. To offer some context, industry consultant Federico Brugnoli presented in 2012 an argument that the carbon footprint of leather should begin at the slaughterhouse and end at the tannery gate when the finished leather is shipped to customers. The effect of this would be to exclude any of the agricultural footprint involved in animal rearing from being attached to hides or skins in most situations. His report, commissioned by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, drew on earlier work on lifecycle analysis by Danish academic Bo Pedersen Weidema. The technical name Professor Weidema gives to this idea is ‘system expansion’. His position is simple enough: you have to identify the ‘determining product’, the main product for which the animal is reared, and apportion to it 100% of the environmental weight of rearing the animal, its upstream carbon footprint.
Leather that comes from cattle, goat and sheep (which is almost all the leather in the world) is never going to hold ‘main product’ status. Those animals are looked after and sold for meat and milk; their hides and skins also have an economic value, but this is the least relevant reason for farmers and packer companies to take an interest in the animal. It is the products that provide the farmer and the packer with their main reason for going into and staying in business that have to carry the can on carbon footprint.
Figures for wasted hides
There is very little tanners can do about the greenhouse gas that cows, sheep, goats or other animals emit before packer companies transport them to the abattoir to satisfy consumers’ demand for meat. A hide or skin will become available as a by-product of this process. Most consumers and all tanners believe human beings may as well show full appreciation of the beasts by using this material to make beautiful, versatile, sensuous, long-lasting leather. What happens to hides and skins if tanners stop buying them? Would this affect the number of animals slaughtered?
The answer to this question arrived when the Leather and Hide Council of America (LHCA) conducted a detailed enquiry into this very question. It concluded that 5.5 million US hides had gone to waste in 2019 and that a further 4.8 million had followed in 2020. The hides, all these millions of them, could not command sufficient interest among tanners because demand for finished leather slowed and this material, with great potential for adding value, went to landfill or incineration. The animals were still raised and still went to slaughter, of course, as the very existence of the incinerated and landfilled hides proved; but from the outset, the hides were as far from the thoughts of livestock farmers and meat companies as the heavens are from the earth.
Levers for change
The exercise that COTANCE began to engage with in 2013, the PEF pilots, had its origins in the development of the European Commission’s Single Market Act, which consisted of “levers to boost growth and strengthen confidence in the economy”. In explaining one of the initial set of 12 levers, ‘consumer empowerment’, the Commission said: “To ensure that consumers receive reliable information on environmental performance, the Commission will propose an initiative on the ecological footprint of products.”
This is also one of the reasons why there has been a proliferation of methodologies and standards to attempt to work out what the ecological footprint of a product is. Fastest-growing in terms of use are the methodologies that are based on quantitative information and on the sound scientific basis that LCA offers. As the name suggests, LCA studies environmental impact throughout the whole product lifecycle. In the leather supply chain, this has meant identifying all the main actors in the supply chain, (from the farm all the way through to chemical suppliers and tanneries) and encouraging each of them to put in place lower environmental impact processes, leading to a final product that has secure information and high-quality data to show that it has a low environmental impact, with numbers that can be communicated to the market. Carbon footprint is expressed as the sum of and removal of greenhouse gases in a product system: in our case kilos of CO2-equivalent per square-metre of leather or one kilogramme of sole leather. To work this out, COTANCE obtained data from tanneries and put that data into internationally accepted models, linked to datasets, to produce results.
Political strength
It is the system boundaries, the processes that need to be taken into account when calculating the environmental footprint of a product, that have provoked the greatest debate here.
Agriculture and livestock farming should have been excluded and the lifecycle of leather should start at the slaughterhouse, or to be more precise, on the floor of the slaughterhouse because it is when the hide hits the floor that this by-product of the meat industry begins to have its own separate commercial value. What this means is that we can also identify which phases of the operation at the slaughterhouse relate to the supply of raw hides. Only a small proportion of the activities that take place in the slaughterhouse relate to the raw material tanners use. After flaying, everything else that happens in the slaughterhouse is related to meat. Pointing all of this out made the meat industry unhappy because it suggests the meat industry should accept responsibility for all the environmental impact before the abattoir.
Nevertheless, it is still true that the leather industry only has raw hides to work with because of the meat industry. If there were no demand for meat, there would be no availability of raw hides. Meat is the determining product. But in an exercise such as the European Commission’s 2013 look at PEF, it was one thing to be technically sound and another thing altogether to be politically strong. In meetings with the other sectors that took place during the European Commission’s PEF of a cow initiative (it was called the Cattle Model Working Group), it was always clear that what would win the day was not going to be determined by how good the arguments were, but by how powerful the industry was.
A different approach
It would be better to avoid allocation of different shares of the environmental footprint of a cow. It has usually proved impossible to avoid it, however, and it is at this point that other physical and economic relationships must come into consideration; the physical aspects of what goes on in the supply chain should take precedence over the economic aspects when deciding how to proceed. Unfortunately, a number of the LCAs that have been adopted still seem to give preference to economic allocation for raw hides.
The Cattle Model Working Group took a different approach, following a European Commission idea of linking it to protein content, which is very much a physical question. It is complicated, but has been good for leather because this method says that, on average, 88% of the impact of dairy cattle, for example, should go to milk and only 12% to meat. An animal’s entry into the food chain at the slaughterhouse, therefore, brings only 12% of the upstream carbon footprint with it. At the abattoir, an economic model takes over, attributing 3.5% to the hide, but it means leather’s share of the upstream carbon footprint, according to the Cattle Model Working Group’s submission, is just over 0.4%; the exact figure is 0.42%. This is the good news.
The bad news is that reports are still being published claiming that many thousands of litres of water are required to make one pair of leather shoes. These numbers, which seek to allocate to leather volumes of water ‘consumed’ at the farm (sometimes just by falling on fields as rain or snow), can resonate with consumers and create a negative or bad feeling. This is a battle that the leather industry is going to have to continue to fight.
The promise of 2018
This is true even after the momentous days of April 2018 when COTANCE, after spending five years developing rules for calculating the environmental footprint of leather, won official approval for its findings from the EU.
EU approval seemed to mean the product environmental footprint category rules (PEFCR) that COTANCE and its partners, most notably Italian tanning industry association UNIC, painstakingly put together would now become the officially recognised method for calculating the environmental footprint of leather. Leather came off significantly better with the PEFCR method than with other calculations that finished-product brands and campaign groups had been bandying around for years, particularly with regard to the upstream carbon footprint of a hide. Some groups have used their figures to argue against the use of leather in finished products or to justify a switch to synthetics. After April 2018, it looked as though their calculations had been shot to pieces and would never be used in any serious analysis again.
The European Commission even agreed for the leather PEFCR to be made into an online tool that would make it easy and affordable for even the smallest tanneries to calculate their environmental footprint. In 2020, though, it became clear that this idea would not come to fruition owing to a breakdown in the relationship between the European Commission and the technology provider that had agreed to build the tool.
Following this, companies have continued to publish LCAs and make it clear, when it comes to leather, that they have either never heard of the PEFCR or prefer to ignore them. Upstream carbon footprint has continued to loom large and the economic model applied often uses a percentage value for the hide that is far in excess of where genuine market value has been for years. In fact, this is true even of the Cattle Model Working Group’s 3.5%.
Tanners continue to find themselves pressed by large customers to apportion a percentage of the carbon footprint from raising the animal to the finished leather. Some brands continue to use this argument to justify putting non-leather materials into their products.
Hope remains
Work continues on making LCAs fairer. Whichever LCA study companies develop for leather, the starting point should be a precise definition of the product, followed by a definition of the PCRs, which are important because, once defined and presented in a way that allows them to be verified by third parties, they can be applied to all leather LCA calculations. It is certainly an exercise that can make companies look at their products and processes in a different way.
Determined not to let its work between 2013 and 2018 go to waste, COTANCE announced in the autumn of 2022 a new project called Green Deal Leather, through which it will aim to establish a clear connection between leather and the European Union’s Green Deal and Circular Economy Action Plan. The Green Deal is part of a €1 trillion investment plan and is central to the EU’s aim of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The Circular Economy Action Plan is part of the Green Deal.
COTANCE and trade union organisation industriAll Europe have explained that the European Union identifies the wider textiles sector, including the leather industry, as one of the priority sectors for making Europe’s economy circular.
There will be support for the industry from the EU to help it recover from the effects of the covid-19 pandemic and, in the longer term, make the circular transition. COTANCE will work with industriAll to make sure this includes investment in protecting jobs in the leather sector in Europe and in creating new employment in the industry. It says that driving sustainability and building a fairer, greener and more resilient European tanning industry will be the key to this.
From the outset, Green Deal Leather will drive home the message that Europe can have a leather manufacturing industry that causes “zero adverse impact”. One aspect of this will be to show that leather’s carbon footprint makes it a sustainable material for brands and finished product manufacturers to use.
National industry bodies from Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Portugal and Austria, which together have more than 80% of the industry’s workforce in the European Union, will be the project partners for Green Deal Leather. They will collect the necessary data on workplace safety and carbon footprint from official information sources, surveys, interviews and other channels. The project will conclude in 2024.
