Twenty years of sustainability reports
For two decades now, every year Italian tanning industry representative body UNIC has been sharing details of the sustainability successes of its member companies in a dedicated report.
Italy’s national tanning industry association, UNIC, unveiled a new sustainability report at the Lineapelle exhibition in Milan in February, covering the activity of Italian leather manufacturers in 2022.
This document marks an important milestone for UNIC because it is the twentieth annual account of the sustainability successes that have come to light in Italy’s tanneries. The reports constitute a goldmine of data and real-life examples of what leather manufacturers can achieve and are achieving in environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG). “This started,” UNIC deputy director, Luca Boltri, explains, “because we felt the need to communicate, to share what the tanners were doing.”
He says the series will continue and he has no doubt that the look, feel and nature of the reports will develop in future years. Looking back over the last two decades, though, he says it’s already interesting to see how much has changed. “If we compare the discussion we have now to the ones we were having 20 years ago, it’s clear that things have changed,” he explains. “We have always tried to take a holistic approach to this, and what you can see is that the number of issues that we now include as part of sustainability has increased a lot.”
Size is no obstacle
This latest report paints a full picture of the leather manufacturing sector in Italy in 2022. Together, 1,154 companies produced 111 million square-metres of finished leather and 8,000 tonnes of soling leather. This created revenues of €4.2 billion, 66% of Europe’s tanning sector revenues last year and 23% of the world’s. Those companies employed a total of 17,831 people, with 85% of them on permanent contracts, 18.2% of them women and 15.7% of them originally from countries other than Italy.
“We do have a number of big groups, each employing hundreds of people,” Mr Boltri continues, “but if I tell you the report puts the average number of employees at our companies at 15, you will see that the Italian tanning industry is mostly made up of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), mainly family-owned.” One of the important consequences of this, looking back over the 20 years of these reports, is that it was and, in many cases still is, difficult for SMEs to know how sustainable they were. In response, UNIC has developed tools to help companies collect the data they need to contribute to industry-wide assessments.
Each of the three elements, the E, the S and the G, feature extensively in the reports that now result from these assessments, including this most recent one.
Environmental examples
In environmental terms, the report gives a water-consumption figure of 116.6 litres per square-metre of finished leather in 2022. UNIC calculates this to be down by 13% on the figure for 2003. “Water, after raw hides and skins, is the most important raw material in the tanning process,” the report says. “The wastewater generated must be suitably purified, to remove pollutants and return water that is compatible with environmental ecosystems.” Figures for water that has been processed in the common effluent treatment plants that the industry has in place in Tuscany and in Veneto show average reductions of 97.4% in chemical oxygen demand, of 99.5% both in suspended solids and in chromium (lll) salts, of 96.3% in total nitrogen and of 41.2% in chlorides. Luca Boltri says he regards these figures as “absolutely remarkable”.
Use of renewable energy accounts for a share of more than 80% of all the electricity Italian tanneries purchased in 2022. The report calculates that their overall energy consumption last year was 25% lower than the figure for 2003.
Another important ‘E’ consideration is the solid waste that results from tannery processing: sludge, shavings, trimmings, splits and more. “We now have an established system in Italy for recovering and reusing this waste,” Luca Boltri explains. “For example, it goes into bio-stimulants and fertiliser for agriculture, into gelatine and collagen products for the food industry, and into granules for use in the construction industry.” At the moment, 72.5% of all the solid waste is recovered for use in these ways, with the other 27.5% going for disposal. This translates into 1.38 kilos of useful waste for each square-metre of finished leather and 1.17 kilos of disposed waste, of which 97% is certified as non-hazardous.
Italian tanners have also achieved reductions in the volume of chemicals their production processes consume. Compared to 2007, the first year in which the UNIC reports captured a figure for this aspect of production, last year’s chemicals consumption was 6% lower, with a figure of 2.1 kilos of chemicals per square-metre of finished leather.
Social life
We hear less talk of corporate social responsibility these days but it is this concept of businesses taking note of the positive impact they can make on people and communities that puts the ‘S’ into ESG. In the new UNIC report, coverage of this category includes details of accidents at work, of which there were 565 among leather industry workers in 2021 (the most recent year for which national accident insurance body INAIL, which monitors workplace health and safety, has figures). This includes accidents that occurred to people while travelling between home and the tanneries at which they work. Overall, the figure is almost 60% lower than the one registered for 2003. “Working in the Italian tanning industry is safe,” Mr Boltri insists, “and is becoming more and more safe all the time.”
School is an important ‘S’-word, too, and the report also captures education and training activity in the Italian leather industry last year. There were 108 courses for students in high schools, fashion institutes and universities across Italy and beyond, with 3,800 young people taking part. Representatives of retailers, brands, design companies and finished product manufacturers also had ample opportunity to learn about leather last year from UNIC and its member companies. It ran 47 courses for supply chain partners, attracting 1,667 professional participants.
‘G’-force
Corporate governance issues that are high on the whole industry’s agenda now include raw material traceability, animal welfare and deforestation.
In this context, Italy’s institute for certifying the quality of leather, ICEC, already has a string of certifications in place and these, according to UNIC, “play a fundamental role” in helping its member companies fulfil their governance responsibilities. Two examples are ICEC TS 410 and ICEC TS 412, which focus on the upstream supply of products and materials, including traceability checks on hides, skins and semi-processed leather. In the case of TS 412, these checks go beyond the seller of the material.
UNIC relates in its most recent report that it has been working for a number of years already with the University of Milan to map and verify the real animal welfare conditions in the markets that supply the Italian tanning industry. “What has emerged is that more than half the hides and skins processed come from EU slaughterhouses and farms, which are regulated by one of the most evolved regulatory system in the world on this subject,” it says.
The other 50% of the hides and skins Italian tanners process comes from outside the EU, but from sellers that have, nevertheless, adopted legislation or regulations on animal welfare, UNIC states. ICEC has developed a certification project specific to this.
When it comes to deforestation, “the entire supply chain” has projects in place to eliminate links to farms developed through illegal deforestation practices, according to the association, in many cases working closely with campaign groups with expertise in this area of accountability and governance. Specific examples include work with the US National Wildlife Federation and the World Wildlife Fund to develop a project called Deforestation and Conversion Free Leather. This aims to implement a system of mapping farms to confirm that they are not located in areas affected by illegal deforestation.
Taking all of these aspects into account, Luca Boltri says in conclusion that, for an industry such as leather manufacturing, sustainability is like oxygen. And he adds that, without the deep commitment that 20 years of annual sustainability reports are a testament to, Italy would simply not have the strong tanning sector it has today. “Leather is sustainable by nature,” he adds. “This is part of its inimitable appeal. It comes from food industry waste, animal by-products, and the waste from tanneries can be recovered and reused by other sectors, and this is particularly true here in Italy. Leather is a purely bio-based material; at least 85% of it is collagen, which is fully biodegradable. It is an alternative to plastic and also offers high levels of durability and repairability among its unique features in terms of performance. It is circular by nature.”
Italy’s leather manufacturers employ a total of 17,831 people, with 85% of them on permanent contracts. A little more than 18% of them are women.
All credits: UNIC-Lineapelle Group
