Announcements from automotive company Volvo that it is ending its use of leather has prompted an unusually fierce, but justifiable, response from the industry.

We give a full account of the leather industry’s reasons for welcoming the automotive industry’s shift towards electric vehicles (EVs) elsewhere in this issue of World Leather. Car manufacturers who want consumers to give up fossil fuels as a means of powering their vehicles ought also to encourage a move away from fossil fuel-based materials in their interiors. Anything else would be, at best, incoherent and, at worst, hypocritical.

A number of examples of this incoherence (let’s give them the benefit of the doubt) has come to light in recent times. None has provoked as much reaction as announcements from Volvo. It is not synthetics the Swedish car company is rejecting, but leather.

This March, 2021, Volvo presented the C40 Recharge, its first electric-only car, a car with no leather in the interior, which Volvo justified by claiming it was “taking a stance for animal welfare”. This prompted a response from the secretary of the International Council of Tanners, Dr Kerry Senior, who said: “Not using leather will change nothing with regard to livestock rearing or animal welfare. It will see increasing numbers of hides simply being thrown away and a proliferation of synthetic materials that are mostly derived from unsustainable fossil-fuels."

At the time, World Leather asked Volvo to explain what connection it saw between “a stance for animal welfare” and its decision to stop using leather. It told us to expect a further announcement and this came in September, when Volvo announced that it will eliminate leather from all of its cars by 2030. It repeated its claim that this would, somehow, help improve animal welfare. It added references to the “negative environmental impacts of cattle farming, including deforestation”.

Responsibly sourced leather

In our dialogue with the Swedish automotive group, we pointed out that hides will continue to accrue from cattle slaughter, driven by demand for meat and dairy, whether tanners turn them into leather or not. Volvo’s answer was surprising in some ways and unsurprising in others. It started by recognising that the raw hides it has used to make the leather in the interiors of millions of Volvo cars that are on the road today are “responsibly sourced as by-products from the beef industry”.

You don’t have to know much about where this leather comes from and how the company’s long-serving leather suppliers make it in order to know the truth of this. What was surprising was that it went on to say that, in spite of the decades of excellent service it has received from the leather industry and the consistent high quality of the material it has sourced, it now regards leather as being “intertwined with significant sustainability concerns relating to farming, particularly cattle farming”. Volvo said it was convinced that its decision to stop using leather would, somehow, “help combat” challenges such as methane emissions from cattle. It did not explain how.

What will change?

Having seen this clumsy link between its own use of “responsibly sourced” leather and greenhouse gas emissions from cattle on farms, it was unsurprising to see Volvo also rope in deforestation. “Agriculture is widely acknowledged as the main driver of global deforestation, with cattle grazing being the main contributor, responsible for 36% of agriculture-linked deforestation between 2001-15, mainly in the Amazon,” Volvo told us. “We share this concern about the environmental impact of the wider cattle industry and will therefore transition away from leather."

We asked again what Volvo thought would change if it stops using leather. It said: “As a purpose-driven company, Volvo  wants to address all areas of sustainability and our animal welfare ambition is part of our holistic approach to sustainability. We believe that animal welfare has strong links to many of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. It is also an important ethical issue, a societal value that is strongly supported by the public and consumers globally.”

Original article

In its September statement, the automotive company said that, instead of leather, it would offer its customers alternatives such as “high-quality sustainable materials made from bio-based and recycled sources”. This led senior figures in the leather industry to point out that no material encapsulates these qualities better than leather. The president of the Leather and Hide Council of America (LHCA), Stephen Sothmann, said in response: “If Volvo wishes to utilise more recycled and bio-based natural materials in its vehicles, it should look no further than the original article, leather.”

Instead, Volvo has come up with Nordico, describing it as a new interior material created by the company itself from recycled material that includes plastic bottles, as well as bio-material from sustainable forests in Sweden and Finland and corks recycled from the wine industry. As things stand, part of the animus against plastic is that, while it is possible to recycle bottles into new bottles in the same loop time and time again, taking bottles out of that loop to turn them into textiles can only happen once. Almost all of the textiles available at the moment from recycled bottles are non-recyclable. Two consequences of this are that drinks companies have to use new fossil fuel resources to replace the bottles that leave the loop, and that the textiles, at end of life, will contribute to plastic waste on land and at sea.

Plastic problems

This is a point that another senior leather industry figure, Andreas Kindermann, the chief executive of specialist automotive leather producer Wollsdorf, picks up in his response to Volvo. He suggests that Volvo is wrong to claim that synthetic materials, based on plastic, are a better option than leather. He points out that plastic contributes greatly to pollution in water, affecting life in the oceans and leading directly to the deaths of millions of aquatic animals, birds and fish.

Undeterred, Volvo presents Nordico as something exclusive and desirable. It has worked with US-based fashion designer Phillip Lim to create a limited-edition weekend bag made from the material. The bags are not available for consumers to buy, but will feature in promotional events for Volvo’s EVs. It is a bag “inspired by tomorrow’s materials”, says Volvo’s head of design, Robin Page. The global head of leather industry relations at TFL, Dr Dietrich Tegtmeyer, has a different take. He says any material using plastic is, rather, “a throwback to the last millennium”, when petroleum-based materials were the subject of high levels of hype. For the director of the leather business unit of another chemical group, Silvateam’s Antonio Battaglia, leather is “infinitely more sustainable than any vegan material, most of which is disguised plastic”.

Open invitation

Mr Battaglia objects to this “disguise” and to the way brands in general often present their reasons for taking a stance against the use of animal materials in their products, going so far as to suggest that some brands “resort to insults and lies” when telling these stories. “The main lie is that meat and leather are not sustainable,” he says. “The main insult has to do with the characterisation of meat, and leather, as unethical.” Billions of people eat meat and use leather, he points out. Hundreds of millions of people are involved in livestock farming and meat production and millions of people are involved in making leather or finished products that are made from leather. Antonio Battaglia takes exception to the suggestion that all of these people act unethically and has said he will buy nothing from any company that propagates this idea.

This chimes with the reaction of Andreas Kindermann. The Wollsdorf chief executive, and immediate past-president of industry representative body COTANCE, says he thinks money is the real reason companies opt for synthetic materials. In Volvo’s case, he says he is sure the company has decided to favour synthetic materials for its car interiors because these are cheaper. Rather than admit this to consumers, though, it is dressing its decision up with what he calls “a vegan story”. Mr Kindermann has issued an open invitation to members of the Volvo board of directors to visit a tannery and see for themselves how by-products from the meat industry are converted into “a modern, durable and sustainable material”.

He agrees that the reaction from the leather industry to Volvo’s new campaign has been more intense than usual. “Arguments around animal welfare and the environment are either a matter of not knowing the facts or neglecting the facts,” he says. “We believe that such a large company as Volvo must know the facts.” It has provoked a fierce reaction because deciding suddenly to ignore those facts, after decades of using leather and putting millions of square-feet of it into its vehicles, it feels like an unfair blow.

Volvo’s first electric-only car, the C40 Recharge.  
All credits: Volvo

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