Lived experience of LCA
Lifecycle assessment is such a hot topic that we are devoting the entire Thought Leadership section in this issue of World Leather to it. Here, in the first of three articles, we consider the experience of LCA that companies in the leather value chain have had so far.
Lifecycle assessment (LCA) data is in high demand. This is a world in which brands and consumers are reluctant to take suppliers’ word for anything. After a greenwash goldrush that has gone on for years, no one can blame them. Facts and figures and documented evidence are the name of the game now and LCA has won recognition as the best methodology to use to dig up these gems. Even so, the doyen of LCA in the leather industry, Federico Brugnoli, is determined, in the face of a surge in demand for his expertise, to frame companies’ efforts in a down-to-earth context.
The world’s resources are scarce and there is resistance to sharing them more evenly. “This is one of the main reasons why an evolution from a linear to a circular model is needed,” he says. “This is good for the leather sector, which is one of the oldest examples of circularity.” He puts this forward as the reason why LCA matters today and why leather manufacturers and finished product manufacturers and brands that use leather need to embrace it.
He calculates that 163 of the companies listed in Fortune 500 have already made a public commitment towards achieving not just lower carbon emissions, but carbon neutrality. These companies come from 23 different countries. Mr Brugnoli makes the point that large companies expressing a commitment to carbon neutrality will necessarily have a major effect on the whole supply chain; if they commit themselves to carbon neutrality, they commit their suppliers too; either that or their suppliers cease to be their suppliers. “This is why we have to talk about LCA,” he continues, “not because it is a fun discipline, but because it provides data that will help us find a path towards improvement.”
Numbers game
A warning, though. Everyone is looking for a number, Federico Brugnoli says, but the number is not the end of the work in hand here, just the start of it. There is more to say about this in the articles that follow in this section, but anyone who has heard Mr Brugnoli speak about LCA in the last decade or so will know that this has been his consistent message: this discipline is complex and it is a mistake to try to reduce everything it tells us to a single number, say for carbon emissions expressed as CO2-equivalent per square-metre of material. The founder of specialist, Milan-based consultancy Spin 360 and long-time collaborator with Italy’s national tanning industry body UNIC and with the wider leather sector has never wavered from this message.
The good news is that, in his long experience, practices that lower carbon footprint in the tannery will also deliver production efficiencies and cost savings. LCA exercises consistently flag up for leather manufacturers ways in which they can achieve the same quality while consuming fewer chemicals, less energy and less water. Greenhouse gas protocol divides emissions into three different categories or ‘scopes’, with Scope 1 referring to direct emissions from a company’s own facilities, Scope 2 to the indirect emissions from company’s use of electricity, and Scope 3 covering indirect emissions from the wider supply chain. Mr Brugnoli argues that investing in LCA will show companies how to buy better. In other words, they will be able to see at a glance which suppliers can offer them materials and products that will help lower Scope 3 emissions. He offers this example: “There are chemical producers who are now working on carbon-neutral chemistry. This can have an effect on the environmental impact of leather and on the impact of any finished products made from that leather.” More on this later, too.
Future-proofing the business
The experience of LCA of Tuscany-based leather producer Nuti Ivo is, so far, that it has been instrumental in helping the company develop a strategy for making its production, which generates 1.5 million square-metres of finished leather per year, more sustainable. The company’s head of sustainability and business development, Rebecca Nuti, says she is convinced that making the operation as sustainable as possible and being able to demonstrate this achievement to customers is a way of securing the future of your business. “This is because sustainability has become our customers’ core value,” she explains.
In this case, the Nuti Ivo Group has decided to aim for carbon neutrality as its sustainability objective. Ms Nuti explains that she views this “long journey” as having three distinct steps. The first is to measure accurately the company’s greenhouse gas emissions and set a target for bringing them down. The second is to put in place measures that will lower the company’s environmental impact. And the third is to set up an offsetting programme to compensate for those emissions that remain. Federico Brugnoli says offsetting is a valid tool to use when you can no longer achieve a reduction in your own emissions.
“We are still between step one and step two,” Ms Nuti explains, “but before the end of 2023, we will see our impact come down and we will start to compensate for our residual emissions.” The group’s LCA will cover 17 product families, seven types of raw materials, seven hide suppliers, more than 100 processes and more than 100 different chemical products that are in use at the Nuti Ivo tannery. “It’s a lot of information,” she says, “but the important thing is that the more specific information you collect, the more the result will reflect the actual emissions of your company.”
Maximum yield
Waste reduction is a large part of the benefit that Brazil-based group JBS Couros has taken from its work on LCA so far. Its sustainability manager, Kim Araújo Camões De Sena, explains that different parts of a hide have different fibre structures, resulting in different types of leather with different values. There are materials that are in high demand and materials that are not; JBS Couros has used LCA to work out which parts of a hide cannot yield profitable leather and removing them from the process before investing time, energy, water and chemicals in tanning them.
Mr De Sena realises, of course, that there are companies that are putting tanning waste to reasonable use, making composite materials for example, but it still amounts to what he refers to as downcycling. Instead, JBS has begun cutting off material from the belly and neck areas as soon as the hides it uses have been limed. “This material is not leather; it is still hide,” he says. “But it has collagen and is of value, for example to the food or pharmaceutical industry. We are creating less waste, while reducing our environmental impact and maximising yield.”
Recipe review
Another major Italian tanning company, Rino Mastrotto Group, agrees that it is important to collect specific information. Alberto Gallina, who joined the group in 2022 to manage environmental and social governance, says that using data from LCA to calculate an average for the wide range of leather articles the Arzignano-based group produces was a proposition it turned down early in the process. “We discarded that option immediately,” he says. “Our preference was to be able to compare data from different articles, from different sites, from leather produced using different technologies, and also to look at the differences from technician to technician, because the human factor is also very important.” The group has found important differences, with some of its tanneries showing an advantage in finishing, and others scoring better in the beamhouse. This has prompted further analysis of the potential benefits that could accrue from changing some recipes.
Chemical reaction
Rino Mastrotto Group says its experience of LCA so far shows that the biggest impact in its tanneries comes from the chemicals it uses. It is important, therefore, for suppliers of leather chemicals to engage in LCA exercises of their own. Producer of tannins from tara, quebracho and chestnut Silvateam is one chemicals company that has made a start on LCA. Board member Michele Battaglia says there are errors “inside the numbers” that have come to light so far, but he says Silvateam respects the early results and regards the figures as “the best we have at the moment”.
He adds that it is important for his company and for others across the leather value chain to stick with it. “After a few years of this, everyone is going to have a good number,” he says, “because we are doing a good job. Five or ten years from now, we will have really good numbers. It’s a process: we receive the data, we see where we stand and then we have to improve. By 2026, our hope is to be carbon-neutral, or at least for many or our products to be carbon-neutral.”
Another leather chemicals group, Stahl, worked hard and invested heavily to complete LCA studies for 150 strategic products in its portfolio by the end of 2022. The group’s environmental, social and corporate governance director, Mike Costello, says he now expects the total to be 300 product LCAs completed by the end of 2023. “The data we have is available for customers to see on request,” Mr Costello says, “and we intend to use it to help populate public databases with real, primary data in the next year or two.”
He says Stahl is “still really careful” about making comparisons between products. This is the reason he gives: “We are still in the early days of data collection. Yes we have the tools and we have two people in the company working full time on this, just on collecting data in all of our factories, so we are on the right path, but it’s still early.”
Mr Costello explains that, from the years of work Stahl has put in on LCA so far, one clear conclusion it has drawn is that by far the greatest impact on the carbon footprint of its leather chemicals products is the carbon footprint of the raw materials. In fact, its calculation of its own greenhouse gas footprint is that 90% is in upstream raw materials. “This doesn’t meant that our processes are not important too,” he continues. “We focus on those, and we have made gains there, but the real focus now is on Scope 3, indirect emissions, which for us is on the extraction and the processing of the raw materials.” He says that, as a general rule, the more sophisticated the chemical product, the higher its carbon footprint will be, but as a caveat he points out that these products are likely to be used more sparingly in a recipe for a particular leather article. The use of higher volumes of more basic products in the beamhouse and retanning make more of a contribution towards most tanners’ overall global warming potential, he points out.
Another observation he makes on the environmental footprint of leather is that, like everyone in the industry, he thinks that there should be zero allocation for what happens to the raw material before it leaves the abattoir. He is confident this will happen. But when it does, it means the contribution of chemicals and of the raw materials for those chemicals to the overall carbon footprint of leather will be even greater. For this reason, he thinks there should be wide interest across the industry in the work Stahl and others are trying to do. “Chemicals could, potentially, have the largest impact for a tannery in the future,” he says.
Federico Brugnoli, arguably the leather industry’s foremost authority on LCA.
Credit: Micam
