Leather had its ups and downs at COP26, but, in the end, it came out of the event well.

There was plenty of talk about leather at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, in Glasgow in November, not all of it directly helpful. Fashion designer Stella McCartney generated many of the leather headlines. She used a fringe event at the conference to launch an installation called ‘Future of Fashion: An innovation conversation with Stella McCartney.’ She claimed to be the first designer to use mycelium material Mylo to make clothes and displayed these as a centrepiece for the installation. To emphasise the point, the clothes were displayed on mannikins that wore curious hats shaped like the caps of Amanita muscaria mushrooms.

CNN interview

This attracted plenty of attention and, although the maker of Mylo, Bolt Threads, has told World Leather that its aim is not to replace leather, the designer wasted no time in an interview opportunity with CNN to paint leather in a bad light. She said: “When we take a plant-based bag or shoe into America, for example, we are taxed at 30%. We have a 30% taxation. Leather has none. But if you put a sliver of pig leather onto that same product, your tax is removed. We are penalised, basically. We should be getting a 30% tax break for a vegan product and leather products should have a hit. It’s all backwards.”

The Leather and Hide Council of America (LHCA) found her breakdown of the complicated topic of tariff rates intriguing. It says more detailed information about any specific product would be essential for analysing the claims in detail, but LHCA president, Stephen Sothmann, points out that what matters most is not the material the bag is made from but the country from which it is shipped to the US market. For leather bags imported from countries that have no free-trade agreement with the US, the tariff would be 8%, not zero. And if it were a non-leather bag, the tariff would range between 5% and 20%, depending on the material. “Bags made of cotton canvas are closer to 6%,” he explains. “Bags made from plastic materials seem to be in the 20% range.” He says he has seen no examples of tariffs of 30% on bags.

It’s too soon, it seems, for any bags made from Mylo to be available on Stella McCartney’s e-commerce site, but four of the top-ten bestsellers could be described as being plant-based: two are made from viscose, the other two from cotton. The other six bestsellers are made of plastic, typically a combination of polyurethane and recycled polyester. All of the top ten, prices of which range from $1,395 to $750, are made in Italy, from where imports to the US attract the same tariffs as products from other European Union countries and are in the ranges Mr Sothmann describes.

Petition mission

CNN aside, Ms McCartney set out to have her ‘innovation conversation’ with as many COP26 delegates as possible, inviting them to sign a petition she had drawn up calling for an end to the use of leather. This petition includes tiresomely familiar supposed links between leather and climate change, leather and biodiversity, and leather and the Amazon rainforests. It throws in a shocking statistic about the life expectancy of tannery workers in Bangladesh, claiming that 90% of them die before the age of 50.

The industrial development officer for leather at the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), Ivan Kra´l, who has extensive experience of projects in the leather industry in Bangladesh, says he has seen no information that supports this claim. He thinks the suggestion may come from a 2012 report from Human Rights Watch and explains that UNIDO tried hard to engage with the campaign group about this at the time. He recalls putting questions to the report’s authors only to meet with a failure on their part to give clear answers. We have received clear answers from the Bangladesh Tanners Association (BTA). It says Ms McCartney’s claim is baseless. “BTA has never seen these statistics before,” chairman, Shaheen Ahamed, has told us.

Royal visit

One visitor to the Future of Fashion installation that Stella McCartney was particularly pleased to see was Charles, Prince of Wales. We know this because the designer published a COP26 diary in Vogue and she devoted one of the entries to the prince. “His Royal Highness was excited to learn about our innovative technologies,” she wrote. “We also spoke about the need for fashion to stop using leather if we want to hit our 2030 climate goals; we cannot wait another moment.” She may have convinced the prince and she may have persuaded him to sign her petition, but we think both outcomes unlikely for reasons we make clear below.

Her efforts certainly won her no favours in the eyes of the leather industry’s representative body in the European Union, COTANCE. It sent an open letter to the designer immediately after COP26, signed by president, Manuel Ríos. “We understand that there are people who do not want to use animal products,” the text said. “We respect that.” But it went on to say that her attempts to promote an anti-leather agenda at this global event ran “counter the logic of the circular economy”. It said livestock must be part of the solution for reaching the COP 26 objectives and that, as a by-product of the livestock industry, leather has to be part of the equation.

When in Rome

A few days before the encounter at ‘Future of Fashion’, Prince Charles was in Rome. A famous supporter of environmental causes for many decades now, the prince is the founder of a coalition called the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI). A fashion taskforce set up by SMI held an event to coincide with the 2021 G20 Rome Summit at the end of October, using the occasion to present a tool called Digital ID. The tool’s purpose is to provide a virtual certificate of the sustainability credentials of luxury products.

Leathergoods brands including Mulberry, Burberry, Chloé, Gabriela Hearst and Giorgio Armani are among the members of the taskforce. Representatives of some of these brands, including Mulberry chief executive, Thierry Andretta, attended the Rome event, at which the prince was a guest of honour.

Examining a Mulberry bag equipped with the new traceability tool, the SMI founder first asked Mr Andretta if the bag was made from leather. On confirming that it was, the Mulberry chief executive was able to offer extra details, including that the source of the leather was a cattle farm engaged in regenerative farming and that the leather was manufactured using low-carbon production methods (see below). Prince Charles reacted by saying he wished more people “knew the value” of ethically produced leather as part of the circular economy. He compared leather favourably to plastic or “strange, spun” synthetic material. He said the development of a tool to make it easier to communicate this information to consumers was encouraging. Whether he was able to find a diplomatic way later in the week of conveying the same sentiment to Stella McCartney about her choice of “strange, spun” synthetic material and her lack of knowledge of the value of leather is not recorded in the COP26 diary she submitted to Vogue.

Knowledge exchange

Meanwhile, across the city, at a parallel international trade and knowledge exchange, leather received a much fairer hearing. This event was hosted by the chamber of commerce of the host city; it views itself as a champion of the circular economy and has been running a specific Circular Glasgow initiative for more than five years. The sustainability and innovation director at Scottish Leather Group (SLG), Dr Warren Bowden, is an ambassador for Circular Glasgow and was one of the speakers at the COP26 trade and knowledge event. He invited the audience of global trade and industry leaders to look up and read the manifesto that the leather industry published in the build-up to COP26 and pointed out that the leather industry’s place in the circular economy is neither hypothetical nor aspirational. This is what the leather industry has been doing for years, he insisted.

Scottish Leather Group’s own shift to circular began in 2003, he explained. Since then, its installation of a waste-to-energy plant at its Bridge of Weir tannery, its realisation that it can only “borrow” (Dr Bowden’s word) the water it uses before putting it back into the watershed from whence it came, its careful sourcing of raw materials and a series of other measures have allowed the group to reduce the carbon intensity of its leather by 90%. Famously, it now claims to offer its customers “the lowest-carbon leather in the world”, having reduced the average carbon intensity of its leather from 10.9 kilos of CO²-equivalent per hide in 2003 to 1.1 kilos in 2020. COP26 visitors to Glasgow who made use of the electric buses that ferried delegates between venues would have sat on this low-carbon leather, he pointed out.

The group’s contention is that data from lifecycle assessment, compiled by organisations external to SLG in accordance with ISO standards and sector guidelines, provides “layers of credibility” to back up the lowest-carbon leather claim. From this, a figure for finished leather emerges of a global warming potential of between 7.7 and 9.8 kilos of CO²-equivalent per square-metre of finished leather, from core activities and a share of upstream impact.

To continue on this trajectory will mean, according to Warren Bowden, that SLG could achieve net zero by 2025, and do so without offsetting but through its own activities. “We could actually be producing a carbon-positive product,” he insisted. “Making our product from this carefully sourced raw material through a circular manufacturing process and being able to recover it at end of life will mean we are able to be positive to the planet.”

Planet-positive products

An early example of this recovery of the material at end of life is a new SLG partnership that helped Mulberry make the bag it showed to Prince Charles in Rome. Under a strategy it calls ‘Made To Last’, Mulberry will seek to buy back, restore and re-sell bags that its customers no longer want to use. With bags that it deems beyond repair, its intention is to buy them back anyway and send them to SLG and for the leather manufacturer to feed them into its waste-to-energy set-up. In this way, these bags will provide fuel for making new leather and raw material for new bags.

“It’s a positive impact on the planet,” Dr Bowden told the COP26 audience. “I would ask you to contrast that with some of the other materials that we see in our everyday lives. The last 30, 40 or 50 years have seen a profusion of plastics, composites and fossil fuel-derived this and that. In my view, leather is already one of the most sustainable materials on the planet.” He said the lifecycle assessment (LCA) numbers for SLG that he shared at the event in Glasgow proved this. “They are orders of magnitude lower than the data that is generally presented for this type of material,” he said. “There are an awful lot of myths to be busted.”

He extolled LCA’s worth but pointed out that the focus of its analysis is on the production phase. He asked: “What about the use phase? How long will your leather boots, or handbag or jacket last? I dare say decades, possibly generations.” He argued that this, too, should inform our choices as consumers. “You are going to drive the change,” he told those in the room and those connecting online. “Wouldn’t it be great if you could see the true cost of your products when you buy them, the true impact on the planet, not just the price-tag? If we had the choice, many of us would buy products that have a lower impact.” 

The value of ethically produced leather is the topic of conversation in Rome between  Prince Charles (left) and Mulberry chief executive, Thierry Andretta.

Credit: Clarence House

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