Years of work in the European Union to develop clear rules for calculating products’ environmental footprint are nearing their conclusion. The leather industry was an early and ardent contributor to this effort, but there are fears now that labelling systems may still end up being unfair to natural materials.

The European Green Deal aims to smooth the path of industry towards a cleaner, greener and more circular economy. It underlines the importance of making it easy for consumers to make sustainable choices. This seems to spell the end for greenwashing, the practice of dressing products up to appear more sustainable than they really are. However, to remove the risk of the public being taken in by greenwashing, it is imperative to have reliable, comparable and verifiable information.

There is a story by Jorge Luis Borges, written in 1975, whose title translates as ‘Utopia of a Tired Man’, in which the narrator stumbles upon a gentleman who lives several centuries into the future. They reflect together on the differences between life in the narrator’s time and the world to come. One observation is that in the second half of the twentieth century “people were naive; they believed that a product was good because the company that made the product asserted that it was good and kept repeating the message”. Half a century on, it is clear that this tactic still works for many marketing teams, and that consumers need help in shaking off the naivety Borges refers to.

Exciting times

To this end, the European Commission has spent almost a decade now trying to create rules for calculating the product environmental footprint (PEF) of a wide range of consumer goods. The leather industry was an early participant in the pilot phase of the PEF programme, signing up in 2013. The industry’s representative body in the European Union, COTANCE, worked hard for the next five years to collect data and formulate a method for using that data to calculate leather’s environmental footprint. It won the approval of the European Commission for its pilot PEF in April 2018.

This was an exciting time because, using the newly official recognised method for calculating environmental footprint, leather came off significantly better than it does with the calculations that some finished-product brands and campaign groups have insisted on using for years, particularly with regard to the upstream carbon footprint of a hide. Some groups have used these inflated figures to argue against the use of leather in finished products or to justify a switch to synthetics. It looked in April 2018 to many in the leather industry that these older methods could never be used in any serious analysis again. Perhaps Borges would call us naive because this has turned out not to be the case.

Message unread

Paris-based footwear brand Veja ignored the European Commission-approved PEF category rules when it reported in 2021 that raw materials account for 71% of its total carbon footprint and that leather accounts for 97% of the impact of all of its raw materials. This is a long way from reflecting the European Commission-approved pilot PEF’s attribution to leather of 0.42% of the upstream carbon footprint of a hide.

Likewise, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition ignored it when updating its influential Higg Materials Sustainability Index in 2020. Leather and other natural materials score badly in the index, while plastic-based synthetics are its shining stars. This spurred the secretary of the International Council of Tanners (ICT), Dr Kerry Senior, to say that the Higg re-jig had led to a negative perception of leather that does not reflect its sustainable, circular nature. He added: “We believe that the reputation and viability of leather and leather manufacturers are being unfairly damaged by an assessment that does not reflect the true nature of leather or, indeed, the alternatives.”

Recommendation time

In 2019, the European Commission announced that, with the pilot phase over, it would press ahead and prepare a formal recommendation on PEF category rules for the legislative bodies of the EU to consider and, it hopes, bring into law. The Commission completed its recommendation document in December 2021 and it is now a question of waiting to see when the legislative bodies can fit this into their agenda.

This should be good news. It should help bring the work begun in 2013 to a successful conclusion and oblige companies (not just ask them nicely) to measure accurately and communicate truthfully their environmental performance. As a result, competing in the market using sound environmental information will become part of the price companies from all over the world must pay if they want to sell to customers in the EU. 

Open doors?

Putting all of this into the context of the Green Deal, as the Commission does in the recommendation document, it ought to open doors for a material that offers the recyclability, waste elimination, repairability, longevity, sustainability, ocean-protecting, small business-supporting, green procurement-assuring and green employment-stimulating characteristics of leather. But ICT’s Dr Kerry Senior harbours reservations, and he is not alone.

In the build-up to the publication of the recommendation document, a new international coalition of organisations representing natural materials emerged, calling itself Make the Label Count (MTLC). At its launch last autumn, it said that the PEF methodology the European Commission is recommending is lacking in a number of key areas. Much has happened since 2013 to increase knowledge of the environmental impact of materials, MTLC has said. It adds that the EU’s proposals are likely to set global standards for making clothes, shoes and other consumer products greener, and it insists that, to get this right, amendments to the methodology are needed. “The EU’s proposals could deliver positive outcomes if the method behind them is amended,” the campaign group said at its launch. “We must act now and get it right, to ensure the claims that companies will use on their labels are credible and that consumers are not misled.” One clear example of this, MTLC says, is that the environmental impacts of microplastic pollution should be included in the PEF methodology. But the Commission’s recommendation document makes no reference to this.

Kerry Senior says MTLC is correct to ask for this inclusion and other updates in the definitive labelling system that will come out of all these years of work. He has expressed concern that the PEF labelling system could even do more harm than good to suppliers of natural materials. Dr Senior concludes: “The positive benefits of natural fibres like leather are always overlooked, while their negative impact relative to synthetics is overstated. Systems that push manufacturing towards fossil-fuel based synthetics cannot be the answer.”

The true face of labelling. Artist and leathergoods designer Nadia Chellaoui proudly tells the world about the Moroccan artisans who make her bags by hand. Not everyone is this transparent. 
Credit: Nadia Chellaoui

Share this story: