Time to tell leather’s circular story
The European Commission is pressing ahead with its plans to bring in official policies, and even legislation, to determine what is and what is not a sustainable product. A public consultation is under way, giving people across the industry a chance to state leather’s case for inclusion.
Consumers from inside and outside the European Union (EU) have until June 9 to take part in a public consultation about sustainable products1. Following its publication at the end of 2019 of a set of policy initiatives called The Green Deal and of a Circular Economy Action Plan in March 2020, the European Commission is now preparing to put in place a legislative proposal for making clearer what is and what is not a sustainable product.
The Commission wants the ways of working of product manufacturers who are “frontrunners” in sustainability to become the norm. It wants to make sure that, when people go to buy what they need, the products on offer are fit for an economy that is climate-neutral, resource-efficient and circular. It wants waste to reduce. It will seek to bring in legislation to make sure this happens and this initiative, which it calls the Sustainable Products Initiative (SPI), is a means of making sure that legislation is clear and fair.
The story so far
In its preparatory work on the launch of a major new policy or law, the Commission publishes a roadmap to describe the problem it wants to tackle and the objectives it wants to meet. Without going into too much detail, the roadmap provides an outline of policy options and invites feedback on that outline. For the SPI roadmap, this initial feedback exercise ran from September to November 2020.
What happens next is that the Commission launches a fuller public consultation, with more precise questions to the stakeholders based on an evaluation of the replies the initial exercise brings in. This is the stage the SPI is at now. The Commission intends to have the SPI complete before the end of 2021.
As part of the consultation that is going on at the moment, all citizens and organisations are welcome to contribute information and opinions that will help shape the SPI. The Commission has said suppliers, manufacturers (including small and medium enterprises, SMEs), technical experts, industry organisations, campaign groups and everyday consumers are among those for whom this may be of particular interest.
Trillion euro budget
Seeking answers to the question of what makes a product sustainable is part of the Green Deal and the Circular Economy Action Plan. The EU wants a recovery package that will help alleviate “the dramatic and unprecedented effects of the covid-19 crisis”, at the same time as investing in Europe’s longer-term sustainable future.
The EU intends to “mobilise” at least €1 trillion in investment (with money from public and private funding) to make its economy carbon-neutral by 2050. On the path towards that, it envisages spending tens of billions of euros in the decisive decade of the 2020s to help workers develop skills and competences for the job market of the future, and to help SMEs, start-ups and incubators to create new economic opportunities.
When it comes to the products companies manufacture and make available for consumers to buy, these new economic opportunities will need to contribute to keeping climate and environmental impacts “within planetary boundaries”. If the planet is unable to sustain what we want to make and buy, the implication is that we will no longer be allowed to make them or buy them. It seems difficult to articulate an argument against that.
With regard to manufactured goods, the SPI makes it clear that it is going to be necessary to reduce “the overall lifecycle climate and environmental footprint” of products for sale in the EU market. Part of this, it spells out, will be achieving longer product lifetimes through, for example, making items more durable and repairable, increasing their use of circular materials, reducing waste and achieving higher recycling rates. The EU envisages the investment of enormous sums of money to bring these objectives to fruition.
Growing demand
And, if feedback that e-commerce platform eBay offered upon seeing the roadmap for the SPI process is anything to go by, consumers are sincere about their desire for more of the products they buy to be sustainable. The company considers itself to be “a key player in the circular economy”.
According to eBay’s formal submission, the number of searches on its platform that specify a desire for products that are sustainable and environmentally friendly almost doubled between 2018 and 2019. It described demand for goods that are pre-owned, eco-designed and repairable as “ever-growing”.
Key principles
In the build-up to the launch of the roadmap, the representative body of the leather industry in the European Union, COTANCE, made a formal submission of its own to say it wanted claims about product sustainability to be clear for consumers and to sow no confusion. It complained that the suppliers of alternative materials and of finished products made from those materials still misuse leather’s name to try to put a gloss of naturalness and quality on what they offer. “They ought to be truthful,” COTANCE said of these companies, adding that a lack of truthfulness is a barrier to “informed decision-making” on the part of consumers.
It called for an EU system to establish the key principles of what constitutes a sustainable product to protect consumers from being misled and equipping them to withstand marketing bluster and greenwashing so that they are able to make accurate comparisons between products.
Companies should be free to present their products as sustainable if they want to, COTANCE said. But if they choose to do so, they should present information that is conditioned by product environmental footprint category rules (PEFCR). “This would ensure that any green claims are valid,” it said in its SPI feedback. COTANCE started work on PEFCR for leather in 2013 and won EU approval in 2018 for what it had developed. It has said that methods for communicating information “clearly and meaningfully” to consumers about leather’s environmental footprint remain a work in progress.
Enhanced durability
French fashion industry body the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode also contributed formal feedback to the roadmap. It said that “enhancing durability” is one of the key elements of the eco-design of high-end products. Luxury accessories embrace “core notions of quality and long product lifetimes”, the organisation said, as they are made from high-quality materials with outstanding craftsmanship and savoir-faire.
“Luxury products can be repaired and restored,” it said, “and often passed from one generation to another.” Promoting durability should be part of the SPI, it said, as should design for disassembly or recyclability.
Stake a claim
We have said repeatedly in this section of World Leather that companies and individuals with an interest in the leather industry, and an interest in its future, need to shout about the contribution leather can make to the circular economy.
The leather industry deserves some of the funding that is on offer, but the money is not going to fall into the laps of tanners, finished leather product brands or industry bodies; the leather industry is going to have to makes its case and stake its claim. The current SPI public consultation provides a good opportunity for people across the industry to make their voices heard.
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