The H2O-heavy calculation in a new fashion footprint tool from e-commerce platform Farfetch is comparatively unfair to leather.

In June 2020, online luxury fashion retail platform Farfetch released Understanding the environmental savings of buying pre-owned fashion, the fruit of “initial” investigative research into the environmental benefits of buying previously owned clothing and accessories. Commissioned by Farfetch in partnership with QSA Partners, Icaro and London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB), the report considers displacement rates (“Does the purchase of a pre-owned fashion item replace the purchase of a new item?”) and environmental impacts (“What are the average environmental impacts [carbon, water, waste] for fashion items and what would the environmental savings be if a consumer purchases a pre-owned item?”).

An online fashion footprint tool launched on Farfetch’s website at the same time, was intended to complement the report’s findings and help users “see how they can help the planet” when making purchases of second-hand leather bags and five other product types. The tool is designed to draw from a combination of the report’s displacement and environmental impact figures to calculate a number for carbon (measured in terms of “flight[s] from London to Paris”), water (or “six-person hot tub[s]”) and waste (“average sized pineapple[s]”), for each product category. According to the tool, one pre-owned leather bag saves five kilograms of carbon (zero flights from London to Paris), four cubic-metres of water (the equivalent of three six-person hot tubs) and zero kilograms of waste (or nil average sized pineapples, according to Farfetch’s fashion-forward metrics).

Data diplomacy

Farfetch’s analysis, writ fashionably large by the tool, renders new leather particularly thirsty (three six-person hot tubs per bag!), by anybody’s calculation, but especially when contrasted with the other five product categories. Leather comes last, preceded even by notoriously H2O-heavy denim (two six-person hot tubs per garment). However, when World Leather spoke to the global director of sustainable business at Farfetch, Thomas Berry, he was keen to stress that the retailer had not made a “judgement call” on leather (or any other material, for that matter), but rather “independent experts” (QSA Partners, Icaro and LWARB) had consulted the “best publicly available information, comparable across different data types” before drawing their conclusions. Mr Berry did not want to “go down the rabbit hole of a particular industry” (ie, the leather industry) during our interview.

A closer look at the Farfetch report’s data sources, though, suggests something has gone awry. The report lists four data sources for its leather figures, one of which is the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO)’s 2017 report, Leather carbon footprint: review of the European standard EN 16887:2017, which itself cites an earlier piece of research by leather industry consultant Jutta Knoedler, commissioned by World Leather’s initiative Nothing to Hide and published in the August-September 2015 issue of the magazine. Plainly, the UNIDO report focuses on the carbon element to leather’s environmental brew. Yet, Ms Knoedler did not discuss carbon in the essay referenced by UNIDO (and the link in the report’s references section to Ms Knoedler’s original findings is no longer live).

Instead, Jutta Knoedler discussed “how far the leather industry [had then] come in terms of water reduction” and suggested that water consumption for the production of leather from bovine hides had decreased to around 38 cubic metres per tonne, 38,000 litres per 1,000 kilograms of hide. Therefore, the volume for one kilogram (the retailer’s chosen weight) is 38,000 divided by 1,000, which amounts to 38 litres. In the ‘Material impacts’ section of the webpage devoted to its fashion footprint tool, however, Farfetch writes that a single kilogram of (bovine) leather “can” impact the environment by consuming 17,093 litres of water during its ‘life’, which it uses as justification for subsequently recommending that shoppers “look out for responsibly sourced and plant-based” materials instead, in order to reduce their ecological footprint.

How did Farfetch arrive at a global average of 17,093 litres of water per kilogram in 2020, after Ms Knoedler came to 38 litres in 2015? The answer, though data-driven, relies on a relatively old 2010 report by Arjen Hoekstra and Mesfin Mekonnen, quoted by Water Footprint Network, for information. 

Their findings were as follows:

Evidently, this study did not consider leather a sustainable by-product of the meat industry and incorporates a substantial share of the entire lifecycle of the cow into its assessment of bovine hide water consumption.

European leather

The European leather industry’s 2020 report left its water consumption numbers on the high side, moreover, due to increased participation from companies that process from raw hides and skins to finished leather in the surveys that formed the basis of the report’s findings in 2020, compared to the last time COTANCE and industriAll published a similar report for European leather in 2013. For this reason, having a higher number of full-cycle companies means that the average figure for 2020 is greater than it would have been if exactly the same companies had submitted their data for the reports in 2013 as well as in 2020. Rather than make any adjustment to the data for the sake of presenting a more direct comparison between 2013 and 2020, the later report deliberately published the higher figure, the opposite of greenwashing, if you like.

Further, the 2020 report expressly states that European tanners “have become the preferred suppliers” for high-end luxury fashion brands, such as those that Farfetch offers via its platform. The retailer’s fashion footprint tool does not distinguish between luxury brands and those at the lower end of the fashion scale for its material metrics, though. Nor does it differentiate between sourcing geographies, but instead presents a “global average” for leather’s water impact in its accompanying report. Certainly, as Ms Knoedler pointed out in her Nothing to Hide essay in 2015, a “high proportion” of leather production is situated today in developing or low- and middle-income areas. Ms Knoedler could only then assume that, due to ranging regulations, water consumption in these locations “is higher than in developed areas [such as the European Union]”, which would of course skew the “global average” higher. This points to the need for more globally literate, up-to-date (and easily comparable) information on the international leather industry’s utilisation of water.

Farfetch’s Mr Berry, for his part, acknowledges that the existing fashion industry environmental impact data is “not good”, and that lifecycle analysis is a “very complex” undertaking. We shared the COTANCE and industriAll 2020 figures for leather’s water consumption with Mr Berry; he did not comment on them but insisted Farfetch had no intention of portraying leather unfairly. He praised leather’s “made-to-last” durability and investment value, particularly when considering the resale potential of pre-owned leathergoods.

From Copenhagen, with (long-lasting) love

Founder of Copenhagen-based The Vintage Bar (a luxury fashion e-tailer which specialises in the sale of pre-owned leathergoods and apparel), Marie Louise Schultz, agrees with Mr Berry on this. Established with a keen eye on sustainability, the original intention behind The Vintage Bar, whose key markets are Scandinavia, Germany and the US, was to “help mitigate” fashion’s environmental impact, generally, by “curating pre-owned pieces from the finest brands”, Ms Schultz says. Artisanship is therefore central to The Vintage Bar’s buyers’ mission to source the “right” leather pieces for its online store and physical showroom, as well as the ability to be repaired or refurbished “to the absolute best standards”, by the company’s trusted Paris-based leathergoods restorers prior to resale.

“We want to preserve these items and, with this, also preserve luxury fashion in general, so it can be coveted for years to come. We want to disrupt the industry, extending the lifespan of some of fashion’s most iconic designs,” Ms Schultz explains. She describes The Vintage Bar as “committed to driving sustainable change”, in order to play a role in making conscious consumer behaviour “the new normal”. Farfetch similarly describes itself as on a “mission”. Towards the bottom of the webpage which contains its fashion footprint tool, the retailer states explicitly that “empowering everyone to think, act and choose positively” is a crucial step in its aim to become “the global platform for good in luxury fashion”. Higher up on the same page, it advises fashion-conscious, environmentally astute luxury shoppers to search out “long-lasting, lower impact materials”. Its fashion footprint tool is, clearly, intended to help with this exercise.

Yet, this initial iteration of the tool does not allow for any interpretation of how long-lasting a material is, or could be, if chosen. Leather, a natural, circular substance of extraordinary historical resilience (when processed and crafted into leathergoods, at least) throughout human history, would surely fare very well if measured by such a metric, so long as Farfetch means long-lasting usefulness, that is.

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