Veja has published the results of a lifecycle assessment (LCA) exercise, claiming that it shows raw materials to contribute more than 70% of its total carbon footprint, with leather accounting for almost all of that. Senior figures in the leather industry have entered into dialogue with the Paris-based footwear brand, but Veja is sticking to its numbers and has trumpeted a decision, based on those figures, to reduce its use of leather.

Footwear brand Veja published a detailed report on its carbon footprint earlier this year. It said that the raw materials it uses to make its shoes contribute 71% of its total carbon footprint. It went on to say that leather accounts for 97% of the impact of all of its raw materials. Based on this, Veja said it had decided to reduce the presence of leather in its collections. It pointed out that, while 70% of the shoes in its autumn-winter collection in 2019 contained leather, the corresponding figure for autumn-winter 2020 was 51%.

In its calculations, it found that, roughly, 70% of the carbon footprint that it attributes to leather occurs upstream in the supply chain, mostly from cattle farming. It attributed the remaining 30% to leather production and transportation (see further on). Paradoxically, the brand also said in the report: “Even if using leather is not always the best option, it allows us to produce long-lasting sneakers. As cows are raised and sold for their meat and not their skin, leather is considered a by-product. We give this [by-product] value.”

To its credit, Veja has been transparent enough to reveal its total carbon footprint for 2019 as 36,867 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent. If 71% of this is attributable to raw materials and 97% of that figure is attributable to leather, it suggests that the leather the brand used in 2019 had a carbon footprint of 25,390 tonnes of CO₂e. Veja has also revealed that, in the same year, it consumed more than 250,000 square-metres of finished leather. The carbon footprint of its leather works out at more than 100 kilos of CO₂-equivalent per square-metre.

Best in class

This seems implausibly high, especially taking into account that the Paris-based brand has told World Leather that it aims to source “the best leather in terms of quality, but also taking into account its lifecycle impact”. In contrast to Veja’s figures, Scottish Leather Group has calculated the carbon footprint of its finished leather at 1.1 kilos of CO₂e per square-metre. In 2019, the same year as Veja’s leather analysis, UNIC calculated an average of 1.98 kilos per square-metre for its member tanneries. What this means is that the industry’s best performers, who don’t include the animal footprint, are achieving carbon-footprint figures that are 70 times or even 90 times better than Veja’s.

The footwear brand has said it believes its calculation to be correct. But its decision, on the back of this, to revise downwards its use of leather in its shoe collections has drawn much comment from leading voices in the leather industry. If Veja chooses to reduce its use of leather based on a flawed calculation of leather’s carbon footprint, it only seems fair to ask it to reconsider. To its credit, Veja, in spite of appearing a little put out by the forcefulness of the reaction it received, and even accusing figures across the leather industry of ganging up on it, has shared extra detail about how it worked its figures out. But when it carried out a review of its calculations as part of its response to questions from the leather industry, the footwear company still ended up with a definitive figure for the average carbon footprint of its leather of 101.06 kilos of CO₂e per square-metre.

LCA’s limitations

Not for the first time, lifecycle assessment (LCA) is at the root of the disagreement and confusion. World Leather covered the pros and cons of LCAs in a far-reaching interview earlier this year with Federico Brugnoli, a Milan-based consultant who had worked with the leather industry for years to secure European Commission approval of product category rules (PCR), or product environmental footprint category rules (PEFCR), for leather in 2018. We all hoped this achievement would end the debate about leather’s carbon footprint once and for all, but it has not, as the discussion with Veja proves. Mr Brugnoli explains that LCA is a complex discipline; it is based on science, and assessments take a long time and have to be carried out by professionals. “Just to communicate a number doesn’t mean much,” Federico Brugnoli says. “The amount of data required to carry out a proper assessment is vast, and data quality is very important. I am trying to move as far away as possible from presenting single numbers in this debate now."

Veja’s sourcing team carried out an initial LCA in 2018, basing this exercise on the tools developed by Swedish group EPD International. EPD International has published a long list of PCRs and has many more under development. In the last year or so, it has published around 25 new PCRs, including separate ones for cooked and uncooked pasta. In the past, it has published one for finished leather too, but in its analysis, Veja used a PCR designed for meat instead.

The tanneries Veja works with are in Brazil and it factored into its LCA a calculation of the value of a cattle hide in Brazil at 3.5% of the value of the animal. This figure seems high at a time when the value of hides in many markets has been closer to 1% of the value of the animal. It is not clear if Brazil’s relatively complicated system of using kilos to calculate the weight of a live animal and the ancient measurement of arrobas (traders in Brazil round up one arroba to 15 kilos) to calculate the weight and value of a carcass has made this more complicated. What is clear, because Veja spells it out, is that 72.4 kilos of CO₂-equivalent, out of the total of 101 kilos per square-metre of leather, “represents livestock farming”. The tannery’s share, it says, is 24.8 kilos, while the other 3.8 kilos can be pinned on the doors of the abattoir and transportation companies involved in supplying leather manufacturers with their raw material.

Data choices

Secretary to the International Council of Tanners (ICT), Dr Kerry Senior, says he sees little point in arguing with Veja about its choices. All LCA results are dependent on the choices companies make, the system boundaries they set and the data sources they quote.

He observes, however, that the economic allocation factor for hides “appears to be very high and out of date”. Veja’s figure of 3.5%, based on Brazilian prices, “was last accurate around 2014, depending on the market”, Dr Senior explains. Since then, hide prices have fallen dramatically. Analysis of the prices in the US, European Union, Australian and, yes, Brazilian markets in 2020, gave an average of 1% of the value of the animal. The ICT secretary says Brazil’s figure was lower than the average. Prices have risen in Brazil and elsewhere throughout 2021, but have not approached 3.5%.

“Given the importance of livestock farming in the footprint of Veja’s leather, correcting this figure would result in a dramatic impact,” he says. However, he points out that market fluctuations mean wide-ranging figures are always likely to come from a model that includes economic allocation.

No carry-over

Dr Senior makes it clear that the position of the leather industry is that no percentage of the impact of livestock rearing should carry over to the hide. “This is incorporated into the CEN EN standard for the carbon footprint of leather,” he explains. “Cattle are reared for milk and meat and the hide is a by-product.” To dispel any doubt about this, he raises the point that, globally, approximately 45% of the hides that result from meat and dairy consumption do not enter the leather supply chain. In the US in 2019, millions of hides, 17% of the total, went to landfill. Furthermore,  objective economic analysis by Montana State University has shown that demand for hides and leather does not drive livestock farming; hide demand has no direct influence on the number of cattle reared or slaughtered.

Putting the by-product argument to one side, Dr Senior argues that, even if an allocation from livestock farming is to be passed on to the carbon footprint of hides and leather, the figure Veja quotes, 72.4 kilos of CO₂-equivalent for each square-metre of finished leather, seems high. He takes account of the footwear brand’s inclusion here of a share of carbon emissions from crop farming (for animal feed), machinery, transport, and production. An alternative figure that Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations quoted for Brazilian beef cattle in 2017 was 34.59 kilos of CO₂-equivalent per kilo of animal weight. “It is not clear what is included in the FAO figure and it may be that it does not include crop farming, machinery, transport and production,” Dr Senior says. “However, I would be surprised if that were to make such a big difference.”

At odds with other studies

He references a French, Irish, Italian and Spanish study from 2019, ‘Life Beef Carbon’, which analysed the footprint of cattle farming in all those countries, factoring in energy, chemicals and feed. It found that the highest footprint was less than 25 kilos of CO₂-equivalent per kilo of animal weight. He compares this with FAO figures and, applying the same differential to Brazil,  concludes that the inclusion of energy and the other extra factors from the Veja LCA would give an adjusted figure for Brazil of between 39 and 43 kilos of CO₂-equivalent.

The Veja figure for what goes on in tanneries, 24.8 kilos of CO₂-equivalent for each square-metre of finished leather, also seems high to Dr Senior. It would seem high to anyone who has seen the figures quoted above from Scottish Leather Group and UNIC. If it seems unfair to compare the leather Veja sources with what tanners in Italy and Scotland could offer it, the ICT secretary references a 2016 study from Romania. Considering only the process steps in the manufacture of finished leather, the Romanian study reaches a figure of just under 3.3 kilos of CO₂-equivalent per square-metre of natural full grain, bovine leather, with a thickness 1.4-1.6 millimetres. A final point that Dr Senior makes concerns the impact of products on a per-wear basis. “Veja acknowledges that its leather sneakers are long-lasting,” he says. “Its recycled plastic shoes, which contain some leather, have a carbon footprint of 16.6 kilos of CO₂-equivalent, compared to 21.5 kilos for its leather shoes. The leather shoes wouldn’t have to last much longer to have an equivalent impact per wear, to say nothing of the reduced impact on disposal."

Credit: WTP/Flaticon

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