Building on the leather industry’s efforts to raise its voice at the COP26 Climate Change Conference last year, it is now playing an active part in another United Nations initiative, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative.

At the start of the century, the United Nations (UN) launched an initiative to promote responsible business practice, calling it the UN Global Compact. It describes this as a group of organisations that are devoted to learning, to dialogue and to partnership as ways of  expanding sustainable and socially responsible policies among businesses. It insists it is “more of a guide dog than a watchdog”.

More than 15,000 companies around the world and 4,000 non-business organisations are now involved in the initiative, leading the UN to describe it as the largest corporate sustainability initiative in the world. Participating companies have committed to ten clearly defined principles to support corporate sustainability, with these principles coming from established UN treaties on human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption. Company leaders need to commit to bringing these principles into all aspects of a business, to share progress transparently and to support wider UN initiatives, including the 17 Sustainable Development Goals the organisation set up in 2015.

Act locally

Local networks have developed in many parts of the world to help advance the ten principles at country level. And building on the efforts that many in the industry went to last year to raise leather’s profile at the UN, most memorably at the time of the COP26 Climate Change Conference, it is interesting to note that the industry is now taking part in UN Global Compact discussions at local network level.

The UK network recently hosted a discussion about the ways in which companies are working to reduce carbon emissions in the wider value chain, also known as scope-three emissions. Under widely adopted standards developed by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, scope one refers to an organisation’s direct greenhouse gas emissions, scope two to the emissions from the energy the organisation consumes in its own operations, and scope three to indirect emissions throughout the rest of its value chain.

Within scope three, there are 15 categories and the recent UK discussion limited itself to examining two of these in close detail, categories 5 and 12. Category 5 looks at emissions from waste generated in a company’s operations, including from solid waste and wastewater. Category 12’s focus is on emissions from the disposal and treatment of products sold by the reporting company at the end of their life. Dr Warren Bowden, head of innovation and sustainability at Scottish Leather Group (SLG), was one of the speakers. He explained that SLG has been a signatory to the Global Compact for several years already and has the ten principles “baked into the activities that we do on a day-to-day basis”.

He began his presentation in a familiar place, sharing with the other business leaders engaging with the UN Global Compact at the event SLG’s claim that it produces the lowest-carbon leather in the world. “We’ve been on our journey for about 20 years,” he said, “towards sustainability and, more recently, circularity in all our manufacturing."

He said at the outset that he realised leather manufacturing probably did not fit very well, in some people’s minds, with sustainable business. “But when you get into the nitty-gritty,” Dr Bowden told the audience, “it is arguably one of the most sustainable materials on the planet. Humans have been making it for tens of thousands of years, long before the climate crisis, so do please keep that in mind when you are postulating about this.”

Upstream complications

Calculating emissions from the upstream carbon footprint of hides is complex and often controversial. Many of those advocating alternatives to leather insist a double-digit percentage share of the emissions from a cow throughout its life should be attributed to finished leather, even though people pushing synthetics instead usually ascribe no share of emissions from fossil fuel extraction to the polymers and plastics they prefer.

Nevertheless, raw material is still one of the biggest elements of SLG’s scope-three emissions. “The hides are a waste or a by-product from agriculture,” Dr Bowden explained, “but only about 10% or 11% of that raw material becomes leather. This means that 90% of the raw material coming in is waste, so it’s clear we have a huge waste issue.”

SLG has baseline data going back to 2004, which allows it to pinpoint that the volume of waste accruing from its operations can reach 44,000 tonnes per year. “What we chose to do,” the head of innovation and sustainability said, “and this was before anyone was talking about circularity, was to convert waste into heat for direct use in our own factory and into bio-oils and waste-derived oils, which we sell.”

He pointed out that SLG is able to use waste to produce a volume of energy that would heat 5,000 homes, if it were not needed to make leather. It is also possible to find uses for the residual waste components left over from that. Collagen for the food sector is perhaps the most obvious example; this is used to make gelatin, which is present in many foods. Finding uses for this residual waste has helped the group reduce its scope-three emissions by around 90% compared to the baseline year, Dr Bowden said.

The practice, which SLG has patented, has led to a decrease in direct emissions from SLG’s production and in emissions from all the fossil fuel-based energy that it once had to buy in. In other words, this strategy has also helped the group reduce scope-one aswell as scope-two emissions, to the extent that SLG is now able to present itself as having “an almost carbon-positive position” with regard to emissions from its own operations. “There is a significant reduction in the overall scope admissions by avoiding fossil fuel,” Dr Bowden said, “which is interesting. Then there is avoiding waste disposal in scope three, which is even more interesting.”

A delicate balance

Focusing more closely on scope three again, Dr Bowden pointed out that it is not only about solid waste that leaves in a skip. He said that, as part of its circularity philosophy, SLG wanted to secure its own source of water. The answer was on its doorstep, a private loch on the grounds of its tanneries at Bridge of Weir in Renfrewshire. “We borrow water from the loch,” he explained, “and put it back, through our own treatment plant, after production. Being based in the west of Scotland, we have plenty of rain, but we don’t actually consume any water. We discharge what we take in.”

To be able to present all of this information in what he called “a transparent and factual way”, he explained that the group decided to adopt lifecycle analysis (LCA), accounting for all supply chain inputs and, therefore, covering scopes one, two and three. “We work with different types of hides,” he said, “so there is a range of data, but, in the middle, we typically have a figure in our LCA of 8 kilos of CO2-equivalent per square-metre of finished leather. That’s for all scopes. It essentially creates the entire corporate footprint. It’s a delicate balance, getting all of this right.” He added that the SLG data is “an order of magnitude below” what is commonly presented on some of the public platforms in terms of carbon emissions for leather.

Epiphany moment

Chair of the discussion, the executive director of the UN Global Compact Network UK, Steve Kenzie, described the Scottish Leather Group’s numbers as “an epiphany”. He said some might find it “quite shocking” that this level of leadership could come from the leather sector. This seems like a tacit admission that negative assumptions about leather abound in the wider business community.

Fellow panellist, Kim McCann, who is global head of sustainability in the consumer and manufacturing business practices at PA Consulting, reacted with enthusiasm. She said SLG offered a good example to many other companies. She continued: “I find it interesting that the top questions we see about scope three are on how companies should measure and report what they are doing. My plea to the audience is to stop looking ‘down and in’ at that level of detail. Stop worrying about that too much. Look ‘up and out’ and see what is the right thing to do first, and then worry about how it’s accounted for. Regulations will continue to evolve, but Warren has shown from what Scottish Leather Group has done, you have to get in there and do the right things.”

Doing the right things, she suggested, includes using resources in the best way and seeing how people throughout the operation can help bring about improvement. It also means working closely with suppliers, whom she also calls “waste providers”, to find radical new ways of working that will bring about reductions in emissions across the board. She added: “Companies can no longer say to suppliers: ‘I pay your bills; you will do as I say’. Building innovative solutions together is the right way.”

Achievable targets

SLG has a target to be zero-waste-to-landfill by 2025 and also to have scope-one and scope-two carbon emissions of zero by the same time. Warren Bowden said at the UN Global Compact event that decisions the group has taken in recent years make both of these targets achievable. “We have had to do a lot of this ourselves,” he said, “with no funding. We even helped write some of the legislation around this in Scotland because we were the first to do some of these things.”

He added that the group had also worked hard to create its LCA and that only in the last two years has it felt ready to present the data from it. “We and many other tanners are doing this now,” he concluded. “It is taking off and others will follow what we have done.”

UN Global Compact Principles 

1 Respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights
2 Make sure your business is not complicit in human rights abuses
3 Uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining
4 Help eliminate all forms of forced and compulsory labour
5 Help abolish child labour
6 Help eliminate discrimination in employment and occupation
7 Support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges
8 Undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility
9 Encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies
10 Work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery

Leather at Scottish Leather Group’s Bridge of Weir tannery. Hides, a by-product from meat and dairy, represent one of the biggest elements of the group’s scope-three emissions.
Credit: Scottish Leather Group

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