The representative body of the leather industry in the European Union, COTANCE, says the ‘green transition’ the European Commission has called on the wider fashion industry to carry out is in the leather sector’s DNA. 

Representatives of Europe’s leather, footwear, textiles and clothing industries issued a joint statement in July to present a series of demands to the European Commission. The organisations, including the leather industry’s representative body in the European Union, COTANCE, said their aim was to help ensure “a successful, green and digital transition” for the EU fashion ecosystem. This is something that the Commission called for in a document it published earlier this year.

These demands include funding to support the transition, campaigns to raise consumer awareness of sustainable products, for EU Member States to encourage sustainable production in Europe through green public procurement, for initiatives to attract new workers to the sector and improve the skills of current workers, and for steps to ensure a level playing field in the global market.

The best example

COTANCE secretary general, Gustavo González-Quijano, said: “Leather is the best example of a circular-economy product, as it is the result of recycling an unavoidable residue of meat production. In carrying out this recycling activity, European tanners create wealth and jobs for an entire value chain.” He went on to insist that what the Commission describes as a green transition of Europe’s fashion industries and, in fact, its entire economy, is already synonymous with the way the leather industry works and has done for thousands of years. “It’s in our DNA,” Mr González-Quijano said. He added that leather production can and will become even more sustainable in the future, but said this needs to happen hand in hand with regulators and stakeholders.

What the powers that be have in mind when they talk about a green transition is a move away from the ‘produce-buy-discard’ economic model that dominated the final decades of the last century and the opening decades of this one.

People who live in the wealthier parts of the world regard those decades as economically successful because so many of us have become so many have become so much more prosperous, at least on the surface, than their parents or grandparents were. That this prosperity has come at an environmental cost we may not, in the end, be able to make good is still a relatively new idea and an unpopular one in many government and business arenas, where growth still seems to be the only goal worth attaining.

A different kind of growth

In the new document, the European Commission sought to follow up on its Circular Economy Action Plan of 2020. This new paper is directed specifically at Europe’s “textile eco-system”, which, the Commission makes clear, refers to the textile, clothing, leather and footwear (TCLF) industries. It says it wants these industries to grow, but for it to put the old growth model behind it and achieve instead growth that is “sustainable, climate-neutral, energy- and resource-efficient, respectful of nature, and built around a clean and circular economy.”

The document, which has the title ‘EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles’ describes TCLF as “a product value chain” with an urgent need to make the transition to sustainable and circular production, consumption and business models, but also as one with strong potential to make this change. Businesses, consumers and public authorities across the EU are already focusing on increasing the sustainability and circularity of clothing, footwear and other fashion products, the document says, but the transition is slow and TCLF’s environmental and climate footprint remains high.

War on waste

Its vision for speeding up change and making the transition happen includes familiar, if still highly welcome, ideas. Brands and manufacturers are urged to make sure durability is designed into their products and for the goods they sell to be easy to repair when they break, easy to reuse, to rent out or to sell second-hand to keep them in use and out of landfill. New EU rules will ensure that consumers are provided at the point of sale with durability guarantees and reparability scores.

It says it wants large companies to disclose the number of products they discard and destroy, and suggests that the Commission intends to put in place a ban on destroying perfectly usable products that companies have not been able to sell.

Microplastic measures

Another of the areas that needs rapid improvement is the “source of serious and growing concern” that microplastic pollution from synthetic fibres represents. Clearly, if we used fewer synthetic fibres, there would be less microplastic pollution, and the document goes on to make this point later. Measures it suggests for immediately addressing the microplastics crisis include some less obvious changes, though, including the application of special coatings during the manufacturing process, pre-washing of finished products at industrial manufacturing plants, altering the design of washing-machines and making detergents milder.

This is like rotating the ceiling to replace a light-bulb. It is reminiscent of the Midwest settlers in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, whose attempt to dig an unneeded tunnel across the main street of their small town leads to a large horse falling into the hole and becoming stuck. Unable to release the animal or to think of a good explanation for having a stranded, half-buried horse in the middle of the road, the settlers opt to move the entire town away from the horse instead.

To be fair, the document also says the promotion of innovative materials should be part of the solution. It is difficult to know if the Commission would class a material that has been in use for millennia as innovative, but at least brands that choose leather for their products can take comfort from the fact that they are adding nothing to the considerable burden that washing-machine and detergent manufacturers seem likely to face.

Value-add

Moving on, the document says there is significant potential for the TCLF sectors to reduce waste and make sure any waste that does accrue creates further value. As Gustavo González-Quijano has pointed out, creating value from material that would otherwise go to waste is the starting point for the entire leather industry. The industry, like all others, creates waste too and efforts must continue to find good uses for that waste. Making producers responsible for the waste that their products create is essential for decoupling waste-generation from growth, it says, and it points out that the Commission has launched a study into the viability of setting mandatory targets for preparing waste for reuse and recycling as part of a wider review of waste legislation in the EU, likely to take place 2024.

Take responsibility

“Companies should become the champions of this paradigm shift,” the paper concludes. “Those who have built their business models over the last two decades by capitalising on bringing increasing numbers of fashion lines and micro-collections to market at an ever-increasing pace, are strongly encouraged to internalise circularity principles and business models, reduce the number of collections per year, take responsibility and act to minimise their carbon and environmental footprints.”

Leather manufacturers in Europe and in most of the rest of the world know this. Theirs is, after all, the best example there is of a circular-economy product. If the European Commission could find a way to meet the reasonable demands that COTANCE and its partner organisations have presented, it would help producers of leather improve further and communicate their positive circular message more effectively to the buying public.

Frans Timmermans, first vice-president of the European Commission, Virginijus Sinkevicius, European Commissioner for the Environment, Oceans and Fisheries, and Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for the Internal Market, at a press conference on the circular economy in Brussels this March.
Credit: European Commission.

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