The European Union wants new rules that will give consumers the right to know how durable and easy-to-repair products are before they buy them.

The European Commission presented a much-anticipated package of European Green Deal proposals at the end of March. Its aim is to “make sustainable products the norm” in the European Union, to boost circular business models and “empower consumers for the green transition”.

These proposals aim to put in place new rules to insist that “almost all physical goods in the EU market” have a low impact on the environment, and are more circular and energy-efficient throughout their entire lifecycle. This means the rules will apply from the design phase to daily use, then repurposing and end-of-life. They insist that consumers need to be better informed about the environmental sustainability of products and better protected against greenwashing.

For example, new EU rules will come into force to ensure that consumers receive information at the point of sale outlining “a commercial guarantee of durability”, as well as information relevant to repair. The package suggests manufacturers, brands and retailers will be encouraged to publish “a reparability score” for the products they sell.

How long is a long time?

There is well founded concern that fast fashion champions and the developers of fossil-fuel-based fibres that make their business model possible may insist that “durable” means a product that lasts a year or so. This is potentially a problem, but the thinking at the root of the proposals is positive. Brands can argue about what longevity and repairability mean in practice, but they cannot deny that these qualities are, suddenly, of importance and value.

These, as we have been saying and showing for years, are two of the characteristics that make leather an ideal fit with any circular economy idea. The leather industry has the ability to talk about them all day long and show countless examples of shoes that have lasted decades and bags that have grown only more beautiful with age as they pass, hand to hand, from grandmothers to mothers, and from mothers to daughters.

Greenwashers of the world beware

Environmental claims, such as ‘green’, ‘eco-friendly‘, ‘good for the environment’, will be allowed “only if underpinned by recognised excellence in environmental performance”, the document states. Voluntary sustainability labels covering environmental or social aspects will have to have third-party verification or be established by public authorities. It is greenwashers who ought to fear these changes. Makers of leather and of finished products that use leather need to stay on a path of continuous improvement and make their processes increasingly environmentally efficient, but fundamentally they only need to continue telling the truth.

Rage against the machine

Advocacy group Eco-Age has worked with the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights to publish a report called The Great Green Washing Machine. Eco-Age founder, cinema producer Livia Firth, who has a high profile in sustainable fashion, instigated the report. The director of the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights, Professor Dorothee Baumann-Pauly, joined forces with London-based sustainability consultant and former World Bank economist Veronica Bates Kassatly to write it.

It has taken the form of two white papers; the first appeared last September, the second in mid-March this year. Together, these white papers raise seven specific concerns about the way companies in the textile and apparel sector measure their environmental performance and share information about sustainability. They draw the conclusion that current sustainability assessments in the industry are “broadly incorrect”.

The Great Green Washing Machine says there are two reasons for reaching this conclusion, both of which are familiar to readers of World Leather. One is that the most frequent way of measuring the impact of fashion products is cradle-to-gate, rather than cradle-to-grave, and so ignores the products’ use and disposal at end of life. The second is that the current measurement methods assess impact by kilo of material. What really matters, the authors say, is impact per wear.

Material questions

It needs pointing out, although it ought not to, that there is a link between consumers being able and willing to wear or use a product lots of times and the material the product is made from.

The example The Great Green Washing Machine authors give is of a dress. A cheap dress might cost 12 ‘environmental impact points’ and if a consumer wears it once before throwing it away, the cost is 12 per wear. Another dress may cost 1,200 ‘environmental impact points’, but if its owner keeps it for years and wears it 100 times, its cost is also 12 per wear. The main difference, the authors point out, is that at the end of the 100-wear lifespan of the second dress, there would be one dress to repurpose or dispose of. Wearing cheap dresses of the first kind each time over the same timeframe would leave you with 100 dresses to dispose of. The two scenarios, therefore, are not equal at all.

Leather’s struggle

Both of the white papers that comprise the full report are easily accessible through an online search. They are worth reading because they explain in considerable detail what the seven concerns about sustainability claims are, and make recommendations for making sustainability metrics more meaningful. Specifically, the second white paper devotes an entire appendix to the leather industry’s ongoing struggles with the most influential scoring system for fashion sustainability, the Higg Materials Sustainability Index (MSI), set up by non-profit organisation the Sustainable Apparel Coalition.

In the autumn of 2020, the global leather industry formally asked the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) to suspend the score it applies to leather in the Higg MSI. Industry bodies said that what the index presented had led to a negative perception of leather among some fashion brands and consumers, one that does not reflect that material’s sustainable, circular nature. Applying the economic allocation method, the Higg MSI uses the high hide prices of 2013-2014 to arrive at the conclusion that a cattle hide should have a 3.6% share of the impact of the animal on global warming, eutrophication, water use, chemical use and resource depletion.

The Great Green Washing Machine acknowledges the leather industry’s long-held argument that the economic driver of production needs to be taken into account. Hides would not be produced if there were no dairy and meat industries. And if the leather industry ceased to exist, the annual hide volume would continue unchanged. The authors also accept that, if you have to apply economic allocation, outdated figures from 2013 and 2014 are unlikely to provide the best basis for your calculation. They quote the president of the Leather and Hide Council of America (LHCA), Stephen Sothmann, as saying that, by historical standards, the period 2013-2015 witnessed record high global hide prices. Hides may never again be as expensive as they were at that time, so the allocation standard itself is based on an anomaly in the market. They also take LHCA’s point that millions of unwanted hides in the US are going to waste each year.

Updated data

Based on this anomaly, two leather manufacturers, JBS Couros and PrimeAsia, have submitted more up-to-date information from the extensive lifecycle assessments (LCA) studies they have carried out on their own supply chains and the Higg MSI included separate scores for their leather in its 2021 updates. The authors of The Great Green Washing Machine make a number of comments about this. They conclude that the Higg MSI will take into account new information only if companies pay to have the Higg team assess the data, and that, even after seeing and verifying new data, it seems reluctant to alter its earlier, inaccurate assessment of hides and leather.

On the first of these points, we can say, without knowing how much it is necessary to pay the Higg MSI to have it assess new data, that it will be far less expensive than the cost of amassing all the new data in the first place: “a drop in the ocean” is one description we have heard. It would cost money to have a local accountancy firm check the figures and, therefore, it is only realistic to expect the team at the Higg MSI to charge something too. On the second point, while it is certainly true that there is no change yet to the baseline score for leather on the Higg MSI, some in the leather industry believe there could be grounds for “cautious optimism” that attitudes are softening and that such a change could come in future.

The index works on aggregate data and the more up-to-date information the leather sector presents to it, the easier it will become to convince it to make that change. In this way, PrimeAsia and JBS Couros have made initial contributions towards building that aggregate up and there are moves afoot for further additions of data from other leather industry LCAs. All of these will help move the needle in leather’s favour.

These, too, are ways of lending weight to the industry’s efforts to tell its story, which, it’s worth repeating, is simply a case of telling the truth. 

Products that last a long time and are easy to repair have strong circular-economy credentials. Credit: Lineapelle

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