The leather sector’s engagement with LCA is likely to bear fruit if the industry can work out ways to use this science-based system to make it clear to customers that they stand to gain from using leather. Achieving this clarity, however, requires more work.

Ideas and tools that can help leather manufacturers lower their environmental impact have been at the core of industry innovation for years and is still one of the main claims of any new equipment that comes to market. Technology providers are also working hard to make tanning machinery more connected to management information systems. This will make it easier to measure impact and to see quickly if amendments to recipes can make a real difference. And all of this should make it easier for tanners to engage in LCA exercises.

These things take time, though, and time may not be on the leather industry’s side when it comes to using LCA widely to its advantage. Elsewhere in this section, we quote Michele Battaglia of Silvateam, who estimates that it may take a further five years or more to have “a really good number” to use to show the environmental footprint of different leather articles. Five years, at least, of painstaking work and expensive investment lie ahead, then.

Again, as we have said in the other articles in the Thought Leadership section this time, this comes at a time when, in the real market, companies are taking a single number and using it to make decisions today. They are not going to wait five years and there is a danger that the “really good number” may come too late for some brands and some tanners. There are buyers who have already made the decision, based on imperfect data from lacklustre LCAs to move away from leather.

Data quality

A genuine expert on how LCA can work well for the leather industry, Federico Brugnoli, says the discussion on the quality of some of the measurements that are on the market has been a long one. In what he calls “a proper, certified LCA”, one key parameter that needs to be taken into account is “the so-called data quality”. Secondary data detracts from the usefulness and value of any LCA, he continues, and he and his colleagues at the consultancy he runs, Spin 360, remain loud advocates of primary data.

He points out that leather is not the only industry to raise serious concerns about the widely used comparison tools in resources such as the Higg Material Sustainability Index. Figures from the Higg suggest that silk, for example, is 250 times more impactful than polyester. “It’s clear that there is a need for some evolution there,” Mr Brugnoli says diplomatically. There is a wide range of information that needs measuring for leather producers’ LCAs, he admits, and some of them are difficult to understand. “We are talking about something that is difficult, science-based and needs to be understood in the tannery and by people across the supply chain,” he says. “This means the need for the necessary skills and competences is huge because companies are taking buying decisions based on this, based on LCA. There is a threat and a risk. But at the same time, some companies that have threatened to move away from leather are moving back thanks to LCA. There are players in the leather industry who are doing really well on LCA and reaping the benefits.”

Play the advantage

Scottish Leather Group’s Dr Warren Bowden remains convinced “LCA is the only reliable, third-party metric we can use”. And he says the reason it has helped the group secure customers such as automotive group Polestar is that its own detailed, specific LCA allows it to show that the impact of the products it makes is “about half of what people think it is” because the current information buyers are using to make comparisons is based on global averages, the fruit of attributional LCAs. There are clear advantages that a leather manufacturer in Scotland can point to in a more context-specific consequential LCA. Water is abundant there and cattle hides of good quality are readily available and completely traceable. To be even more specific, the energy recycling plant that Scottish Leather Group has had in place for more than a decade, turning material that it cannot make into leather into a source of heat instead, is also paying dividends in its LCA results.

Senior figures from other parts of the global leather industry have expressed a high level of admiration for what Dr Bowden and his colleagues have achieved. One, who has no direct connection to Scottish Leather Group, talks of a recent encounter with the Shanghai-based director of a major automotive group’s design studio. This person, who has a prominent role in choosing materials for car interiors, repeated in a public forum the tired lie that leather manufacturers kill animals. Our industry contact wonders how someone in such a responsible role can be so ill informed and says it is, perhaps, an indication of how far anti-leather campaigns have reached. He says: “A major accessories group has told me it will be out of leather by 2025 and the reason is LCA. LCA is the only game in town for the generation that is taking over the buying decisions and leather is in danger of losing at that game, unless it’s leather from Scottish Leather Group.”

Means to an end

It is not just about the information you can gather from LCA, Federico Brugnoli says. Work on traceability, for example, may show that one farm a tanner sources hides from performs much better than another farm. “From this, what we need to do is to establish links between good products and good farming practices,” he explains. “Traceability, then, like everything else that comes under scrutiny in LCA, needs to be, not an end in itself, but the means to a good outcome.”

For him, this shows, once again, the benefit of consequential LCA compared to attributional LCA. “In attributional LCA, anything that has value shares the impact. But consequential LCA is a kind of ‘what-if’ scenario,” he explains. “What if there were no leather industry? What would we do with raw hides? Major organisations, including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, are considering this as part of their work on LCA. Governments and big decision makers are using it as a point of reference. My personal opinion is that it seems clear from this that the leather industry should receive contributions from the meat industry because we are upcycling one of their by-products.”

He insists this is part of the story that the leather industry will be able to tell as a result of all the hard work already done and will be done on LCA.

Establishing ways to communicate effectively about what is a complex, science-based subject is one of the areas in which there is still plenty of work to do.
Credit: OekoTex

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