LCA is popular, but it has its critics too. Influential voices say it makes complex situations seem too simple and encourages comparisons that are based on information that is not meaningful enough.

All industries have become intent on measuring their impact on the environment in an effort to present themselves as sound, sustainable sectors. LCA (lifecycle assessment, or lifecycle analysis) is now a widely adopted methodology for capturing data to show how big an impact different materials and finished products have. Leather manufacturers and finished product brands that consume leather are among those that have embraced LCA and some of the valuable information that these exercises have generated has already come into the public domain. Elsewhere in this issue of World Leather, we document, for example, the contribution that Scottish Leather Group’s LCA data has made in convincing an automotive brand, the previously reluctant Polestar, to invest in leather for its car interiors.

Nevertheless, there are some who remain unconvinced that the benefits of LCA are worth all the hard work and investment companies have to put in.

All about the context

In the past, we have quoted the work in this area of the director of the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights, Professor Dorothee Baumann-Pauly, and London-based sustainability consultant and former World Bank economist Veronica Bates-Kassatly. In one of their 2022 joint papers, ‘The Rise of Life Cycle Analysis (LCAs) and the Fall of Sustainability - Illustrations from the Apparel and Leather Sector’, they say one of the drawbacks of LCA is that it focuses on environmental impacts without considering social impacts. In much more detail, they lay out their objections to the “highly context-specific” nature of LCA outcomes, pointing out that attempts to draw general conclusions from context-specific data “can result in serious inaccuracies”. And where the context of leather is concerned, the two authors insist that durability should be part of any meaningful comparison. Material A’s LCA might suggest it has a lower carbon footprint than material B’s, but if material B lasts five times longer, B should be the material of choice.

The quality of LCA output, like most other outputs, is wholly dependent on the quality of the data that goes into the exercise. A clear example of a serious inaccuracy deriving from poor-quality data is the leather industry’s recent run-ins with nonprofit organisation the Sustainable Apparel Coalition over the LCA-based score it has applied to leather in its Higg Materials Sustainability Index (MSI). In 2020, the global leather industry formally asked for the suspension of the MSI’s leather score, saying it depended on “out-of-date, unrepresentative, inaccurate and incomplete data” to present leather in an implausibly poor light compared to a whole range of fossil-based synthetic materials. 

Not just numbers

On this, the authors of the ‘Rise of LCA’ paper agree: out-of-date, unrepresentative data, “collected without adequate scientific understanding”, will produce inaccurate impact measurements. Data is not just numbers, they insist, but numbers “that capture, with a fair degree of accuracy, the reality that they purport to reflect”. Gathering data is a science in its own right, from the questions you ask, to how you collect and analyse the responses. They add, in forthright terms: “The larger the sample size and the more independent the data collection is from those undertaking the study, those funding it and those involved in generating the product concerned, the more likely it is that the data will be representative. Many of the LCAs currently used in the leather sector use outdated values, small sample sizes, producers who are not remotely indicative of global production and data that was not independently collected. The result is data GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.”

Distinctions between the details that are important and those that are less so are not always obvious to the untrained eye. In many cases, even otherwise experienced LCA experts will lack the in-depth knowledge needed to carry out truly valid assessments of niche industries such as leather. Companies often balk at the cost of hiring genuine specialists to carry out this work and take a do-it-yourself approach, “with predictably poor outcomes”.

Consequential versus attributional

There is another objection. Attributional LCAs, which measure average impact, are being “universally promoted as a means to inform consumers of the environmental footprint of their fibre and fabric choices” the authors say. They add that proposed European Union Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) legislation is a case in point and the secretary of the International Council of Tanners, Dr Kerry Senior, has said their assessment is “absolutely correct”. When this point came up in discussions at the end of 2021, Dr Senior said that all of the sustainability metrics and labels that were informing the European Commission’s work on this had “the same limitations”. He expressed concern that this was helping providers of petroleum-based plastics present themselves as sustainable alternatives to leather.

But according to Ms Bates-Kassatly and Professor Baumann-Pauly, when it comes to making an informed choice between alternative materials, it is necessary to use consequential LCAs. These, unlike their attributional counterparts, measure specific rather than average impacts; they take into account what specific companies do in making specific products within specific boundaries. “To our knowledge, there are no consequential LCAs of generic global fibres,” the say. “Instead, current evaluations rely solely on attributional LCAs.” 

Another benefit to the leather industry of consequential LCAs is that they are a key component of system expansion. This is the concept that industry bodies, including Italy’s UNIC and the European Union’s COTANCE, have referred to for years as a basis for arguing that the hide’s allocation of the upstream carbon footprint of a cow should be zero.

Investment required

By definition, though, carrying out specific, consequential LCAs for individual companies and, beyond that, for their individual products is a complex and expensive task. Elsewhere in this section, we quote the environmental, social and corporate governance director of Stahl, Mike Costello, as saying the chemical manufacturer aims to have completed LCAs for 300 of the products in its range by the end of 2023. His team now includes two people who devote themselves full time to this work. We have spoken to one prominent leader in the global leather manufacturing sector who has tried to take his group down the consequential LCA road but says he will not continue. “If we have to do this for each article, it will cost too much and take too long,” he says.

One way round this will be for enough LCAs to take place, with the companies carrying them out finding ways to share the relevant data. Then tanners using similar types of raw material, the same machinery, the same chemicals and comparable amounts of energy and volumes of water to produce their leather collections will be able to offer their own LCA results more quickly and more cheaply without having to start from scratch for each article. But this will take time, and while the industry waits, the easy, context-ignoring, average-focused attributional LCAs compiled with old and inaccurate data are likely to remain popular.

Golf score

Brands and campaign groups will quote figures from these studies to justify their material choices. Meaningful data may be more than “just numbers”, as the authors of the ‘Rise of LCA’ insist, but the numbers are readily available, easy to share and seem, on the surface, simple to understand. Another figure in the industry, this time a senior representative of one of the largest and most innovative leather chemicals developers, has told World Leather that he sees no end to the use of these figures to draw quick conclusions about which materials are the most sustainable.

“Buyers don’t want to spend time poring over detailed reports that explain in full the results of an LCA,” he says. “It’s much easier for them just to use their smartphones, scan QR codes on samples or swatches at an exhibition and compare the numbers that come up for the different materials they are interested in. It works like the result of a golf tournament: this one has a score of five; this other one has a score of eight, so the one with the lower score wins. This is what is happening in the real world and I’m not sure what we can do now to make it stop.” 

Bridge of Weir Leather is using the results of its LCA to win customers around to leather.
Credit: Scottish Leather Group

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