Supplier of Nordic Traceable Leather, Spoor, now has access to accurate carbon footprint data for every one of its hides. It is making the figures available for brands to incorporate into their work on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG).  

Since the start of August, Danish supplier of semi-processed traceable hides, Spoor has been offering new, additional information to customers. Spoor’s launch was in September 2020, and from the outset it has used a laser-technology based system for marking and identifying hides. This has allowed its partners in the finished leather manufacturer community and finished product brand customers to pinpoint where the leather in a specific item comes from.

Footwear brand Roccamore and furniture brand Fredericia, both from Denmark, and leathergoods brands Anya Hindmarch and Lutz Morris, from the UK and Germany respectively, are among the companies that quickly picked up on the benefits of using this material, which Spoor markets as Nordic Traceable Leather, in their products. Take Fredericia as an example. For years, the southern Denmark-based company has been collecting traceability information about the wood it uses in its tables, chairs and sofas. It says it is happy now to be able to provide detailed traceability information about the leather it uses, too.

Semi-finished leather producer Scan-Hide is the organisation behind Spoor. It is almost four years now since Scan-Hide chief executive, Michael Sondergaard, spoke at a workshop on traceability at the Lineapelle exhibition in Milan and said its work on developing a laser technology-based system for marking and identifying hides was almost complete. Spoor has proved that the system works; the laser markings on semi-finished leather leaving Denmark remain intact throughout the retanning and finishing processes. With careful data collection and record-keeping of what happens when the finished leather moves to customers’ manufacturing facilities for cutting and use in products, brands can connect the upstream supply chain data to the individual bags, boots, shoes and sofas they want to bring to market.

On the day of his presentation of the idea at Lineapelle, Michael Sondergaard told World Leather that he was convinced consumers, especially younger consumers, wanted to know more about the products they buy. He said Scan-Hide’s traceability system would “add to the story”. And now it is adding to the story again.

Transparency leaders

Spoor’s business development director, Birgitte Langer, points out that many brands are now focusing intently on carbon emissions. It is this focus that has inspired Spoor to make additional information available to customers, detailed information about the carbon footprint of the leather it supplies. Spoor is part of Scan-Hide, she explains, and Scan-Hide is 98% owned by Danish Crown, a supplier of beef and pork to many markets around the world under the control of around 5,600 farmers.

Danish Crown says sustainability is “the foundation of our new business strategy”, which has the end objective of offering customers sustainably produced, high-quality meat. It has said it wants to be a leader when it comes to transparency and that, to this end, it is continuously working to strengthen its collection and analysis of data. “Through our unique set-up at farm level, we retrieve specific data points that help us in our work on sustainability each day, at the farms, in production, as people and employees, and in the final product on the consumer’s plate,” the meat production group says. Its work has allowed it to compile lifecycle assessment (LCA) data for each farm, taking into account scope-one (direct greenhouse gas emissions), scope-two (emissions from the energy required to run the farm’s operations) and scope-three (indirect emissions that occur in the value chain).

Because Spoor also has access to this group information, it has now been able to work out the carbon footprint of its leather and make the details available for brands to use in their own product footprint calculations and customer communications. “We hold primary data,” Birgitte Langer explains. “We have access to the climate data the farmers collect and the system Scan-Hide developed for Spoor means we have traceability back not just to the farm but to a single animal. Thanks to this, we know what the emissions are for each hide.”

If you work with generic LCA data, you need to make assumptions and allowances, Ms Langer continues. But with primary data, which Spoor has from the close ties that link its leather to the farms, the supplier of Nordic Traceable Leather is able to support, with “very accurate climate data and documentation”, customers’ claims of using responsibly sourced leather.

Noteworthy nubuck 

An early arrival at Spoor’s new carbon emissions calculation party is Swedish outdoor footwear brand Icebug. A specialist in creating shoes and boots for use in slippery conditions, Icebug insists it has had sustainability and eco-consciousness at the heart of its strategy since its launch in 2001. In 2018, it signed up for a United Nations initiative called Climate Neutral Now. This commitment involved three steps: embracing the need to measure greenhouse gas emissions, reducing those emissions as much as possible and, lastly, participating in carbon offsetting to compensate for emissions that it could not avoid. This encouraged the footwear company to speed up initiatives it already had in place to improve its environmental performance and, by February 2019, it was able to announce that it had become not just climate-neutral, but climate-positive. 

Like the Danish Crown farmers, Icebug continues to look for further improvements, including in its material choices. Its long-term supplier of nubuck for footwear uppers is Ecco Leather. Last year, the chief executive of Ecco, and former chief executive of its leather division, Panos Mytaros, told World Leather that he feared the company’s DriTan innovation had received less attention than it deserved. Ecco Leather launched this new tanning technology in 2018, saying it would allow it to save 250 million litres of water per year at its tannery in the Netherlands. DriTan makes this possible by using all of the available moisture already present in hides to lower water consumption.

If the reaction to this advancement in some quarters has disappointed Ecco Leather, it can level no complaint at Icebug; the Swedish footwear brand took the DriTan message on board from the off and has shared it enthusiastically with consumers. This includes a claim from an LCA exercise that Ecco Leather carried out earlier in 2023, that DriTan leather’s CO₂ emissions are 34% lower than those of chrome-tanned leather. Icebug has already announced that, from its autumn-winter 2023-2024 collection onwards, the nubuck Ecco Tan produces for its footwear will be processed from traceable hides supplied by Spoor.

Before and after

According to Birgitte Langer, the work that has already taken place to prepare this new footwear collection has yielded before-and-after figures for the carbon footprint of the leather in Icebug footwear. Its calculation for the leather it was using before was an average of 36.4 kilos of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) per kilo of finished leather. The leather it will use in its next autumn-winter collection, Nordic Traceable Leather made from hides from Spoor, gives an average figure of 17.9 kilos of CO₂e. This means the decision to use traceable hides from Spoor has allowed Icebug to halve the carbon emissions it attributes to the leather in its products.

These figures are third-party verified (by an independent environmental consultancy in Denmark) and are compliant with the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology that the European Commission has proposed as a way of measuring environmental performance. Customers will be able to use the figures in their own LCA calculations. Spoor is also working with Worldly, the new name for the platform that hosts the Higg Index, to have the figures for Nordic Traceable Leather added to its database.

For Ms Langer, all of this points to important, real-world progress; it gives a starting point for calculating the carbon emissions attributable to Nordic Traceable Leather and the figures will, she insists, continue to come down because the Danish Crown farmers are working all the time to lower emissions further. Across Denmark, intense research is going on in the laboratories and pilot exercises are taking place on farms, all with the aim of bringing down the carbon footprint of Danish agriculture.

Responsible farming, responsible leather

She calls this “responsible, ambitious farming”, which is allowing Spoor to deliver lower carbon footprint figures for the leather that companies such as Icebug will choose to use. Economic allocation makes it possible to determine an exact value and, therefore, exact carbon emissions for milk, for meat and for every other useful commodity that derives from the animal, including the hide, of course.

This matters, in her view, because carbon emissions data will increasingly become a competitive advantage and a unique selling point for companies that she refers to as conscious brands. “We have reached a milestone,” she explains, “and the Danish Crown data has been crucial. Since Spoor’s launch, our leather has always had traceability data to back it up; now, we can connect this to very accurate LCA data as well. I’ve heard the argument so many times that the hide is just a by-product and that the upstream emissions are not our problem, but I think we must recognise that this is serious and that we are part of a bigger eco-system. If we want to offer responsibly sourced leather, it means taking responsibility across the whole chain. It seems to me that responsible leather companies must accept that.”

A winter boot with a nubuck upper from Spoor-supporting Swedish brand Icebug.
Credit: Icebug

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