The president of France’s Conseil National du Cuir (CNC), Frank Boehly, has continued his campaign to confirm leather’s circular-economy credentials in recent weeks, not least in a stout defence of leather in a podcast called On(Ward) Fashion, dedicated to sustainability in the fashion sector. 

Following claims that the French leather industry prevents 175,000 tonnes of waste per year from being destroyed and, instead, transforms it into a material and finished products that increase its value by more than 2,000%, an industry leader there has now explained in greater depth why he believes leather is an excellent example of the circular economy in action. Frank Boehly, president of France’s Conseil National du Cuir, the country’s main leather industry body, made his thoughts on the subject clear during a lengthy interview on the On(Ward) Fashion podcast at the end of May.

Points that Mr Boehly raises include the contention that it is “absolutely inappropriate” to attribute to the leather industry any of the environmental impact of livestock farming. He argues that, regardless of how many campaign groups claim repeatedly that animals are raised for leather, the message is “on the one hand completely false and on the other hand economically impossible”. He points out that even a premium-quality French calfskin without any defects would account for no more than 10% of the value of the animal it came from and that the average price would be between 3% and 5% of the value. Mr Boehly then says that at least half of French hides and skins are of insufficient quality for tanners there to use at all. This raw material, he says, is sold “at very low prices” into markets in which manufacturers make “entry-level products”.

He tells the presenter, Victoire Satto: “In the face of this, I ask you and I ask your listeners, who could be motivated to raise an animal for the sake of 5% of its value? It just would not make any sense and it does not happen anywhere in the world. No cattle are raised for their hides. No sheep are raised for their skins. These animals are raised for one purpose only: to feed the human population."

Two options

The CNC president then says that, following animal slaughter, there are only two options regarding hides and skins: we can transform them or we can destroy them. “I have no hesitation in saying that the leather industry is a model for the circular economy,” he continues. “What we do is take a waste product and transform it into raw material for other products. This is the very definition of the circular economy. We make this new raw material out of a by-product that is, in itself, useless.” He repeats that efforts to place any of the weight of the upstream environmental impact of livestock farming on tanners is “completely inappropriate”.

Mr Boehly concludes that, even if the leather industry across the world stopped using this raw material and not a single hide or skin anywhere were made into leather, the impact that livestock farming has on the environment would be unchanged; it would remain exactly the same. This, of course, is a separate question from the environmental impact that the leather industry, especially the tanning sector, has itself in its own production phase, but to ask the leather industry to include upstream carbon footprint of livestock farming is unfair, he insists. Companies that sell synthetic materials as alternatives to leather never seem to be asked to include a share of the upstream carbon footprint of the petrochemical industry in their environmental calculations, Mr Boehly points out.

The CNC president says that there are no French bovine hides going to waste at the moment, but that this is not the case with sheepskins. Small skins tanning has a strong tradition in France, but with skins having recently fallen in value to levels of €1 or €1.50 per piece, some of the material is now going to waste. A lack of local desire to collect and use wool these days has not helped.

Butterfly effect

Next in the podcast discussion, Frank Boehly addresses the question of the traceability of hides and he says it is something on which he expects France to lead the way. At the end of 2019, Lyon-based testing and research centre CTC released details of a system it has developed to use a high-power CO2 laser-marking system to transfer a 14-character code to any hide. Marking only takes a few seconds per hide and can be automated. “Ear-tags are like an identity card for cattle,” Mr Boehly says. Since the bovine spongiform encephalopathy crisis of the 1990s, there has been what he calls “perfect traceability of meat” and there continues to be surprise in many quarters that it has not been possible to trace hides in the same way. “It’s all because we’ve been losing access to the animal’s identity card as soon as we take the hide off,” he says.

He likes the CTC solution, which involves capturing the information from the ear-tag at the slaughterhouse and printing a label with the same data and sticking that label to the flank of the hide. Obviously, a label of this kind cannot withstand the tanning process, which is where CTC’s laser-marking system comes into play, marking the hide permanently with the same data. The system includes technology for reading the laser-marking. “Lots of finished-product manufacturers would love to be able to tell a complete story, which would mean more or less tracing back to the animal and the farm it grew up on,” he says. “And I have no hesitation in saying that France can lead the way in this.”

In support of this contention, and in light of projects taking place elsewhere in the industry, he insists that almost the entirety of cattle hides that French abattoirs are able to supply to the leather industry could be marked using this system and maintain their traceability throughout the tanning process and into finished products. He thinks this could have a butterfly-effect influence and have the rest of the industry imitate what CTC has done in France.

Forum for progress

He believes an event such as the Sustainable Leather Forum, which the French leather industry is preparing to host for the third time in Paris on September 13, can help spread the word. It is international and it has speakers from across the whole of the supply chain, from hide supply to finished luxury leathergoods brands. Frank Boehly says previous editions have provided a platform for these companies to tell in detail the story of the success so far of their environmental and social responsibility programmes. “The forum has been able to instil in our collective consciousness the idea that environmental and social responsibility is not some unconquerable mountain-peak,” the CNC president says, “but is instead something that requires a strategy that consists of small steps and is accessible to everyone. There’s always more to do, but it’s a road we have to walk, a path along which we have to keep making progress.” He describes the information companies have shared and will continue to share at the Sustainable Leather Forum as an attempt to encourage companies of all sizes to begin, or continue, their march along the road.

In favour of innovation

Mr Boehly says he finds it “absolutely understandable” that consumers should express keen interest in innovative materials. “New materials can make people dream,” he says, “and helping people dream is marvellous. But reality is often different from dreams; that’s the flip-side of the coin. I don’t regard these new materials as alternatives to leather.” He points out that companies in the leather sector, too, are always searching for ways to improve their manufacturing processes and their products. The industry is in favour of progress and development, he insists.

His view is that, in its defensiveness in the face of unfounded criticism of leather on the part of some producers of synthetics, the leather industry is not seeking to defend itself, but rather to defend consumers. Consumers deserve transparency and truth, he argues, and the leather industry complies readily with that demand. Finished leather undergoes so many tests before it goes into luxury leathergoods, furniture and automotive interiors that it is only fair to regard the industry as an open book, he insists.

Plastic is public enemy number one

“That’s not the case for some of the materials that have come onto the market recently,” he continues. “So many of them contain plastic and plastic is deadly for the planet. It breaks down into micro-particles. Those micro-particles are now showing up everywhere, even at the poles; they are in our water, in the air, in the flesh of the animals and fish we eat and are now in our own bodies too. This is a situation that is only going to become worse and we absolutely have to fight against it. Plastic is the number-one enemy of the planet and of everything living on it, including human beings.”

Earlier this year, Freiberg-based leather research institute FILK published a paper giving the results of tests it had carried out on a series of materials that are frequently presented these days as alternatives to leather. None of the substitute materials exhibited all of the performance characteristics of leather; some of them fell considerably short of leather’s levels on water vapour absorption, water vapour permeability, flex- and tear-resistance. And some of the so-called alternatives contained chemicals of concern.

Frank Boehly welcomes the findings of the FILK report warmly. He points to the non-leather materials often mixing plastics with whatever natural material the manufacturers parade before the market. “There’s a simple reason for that,” the CNC president says. “The natural materials they are using do not have enough resistance to withstand the manufacturing process for finished products. That’s why their producers have incorporated synthetic materials into the mix. These materials are not what they seem and are not what the companies behind them claim them to be. This is why someone needs to stand up for consumers in all of this; they are entitled to know what they are buying. So-called ‘apple leather’, for example, has nothing to do with leather. I’m not even sure it has very much to do with apples.”

Resistance movement

He argues that the misuse by some of these companies of the term ‘leather’ in their product names is proof that they believe the mere idea of leather can add cachet to their ranges. For them to do this in parallel with denigrating leather in their marketing output strikes him as being redolent of cognitive dissonance, or in his phrase, “just a little bit schizophrenic”. In any case, his advice is that the suppliers of alternative materials should stop this practice because the term ‘leather’ is protected by law in France and many other countries and the law, he says, could hardly be clearer.

Leather means the material comes from an animal. “Companies cannot use the term in conjunction with any old vegetable material,” he continues, “and if they do, consumers will know right away that the material in question is not leather. And they should also know that the synthetic materials they are being offered are likely to fall far short of the properties consumers expect from leather in terms of tear-resistance, flex-resistance, breathability, water-resistance and so on; the FILK report makes that clear."

In spite of all the competition, fair or unfair, Frank Boehly is left believing that people in the industry he represents can continue to hold their heads high, proud of the work they do and of the product they make. “Leather,” he concludes, “is truly an amazing material; its qualities are absolutely extraordinary."

Leather’s circular-economy credentials seem clear to the president of France’s Conseil National du Cuir, Frank Boehly. Credit: CNC

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