Cradle To Cradle thinking has been around for decades. It is now winning a place in the hearts of forward-thinking companies who are using its theories and certification system as a pathway to circularity.

To its dismay, the Circle Economy Foundation has found that the global economy is only 7.2% circular in 2023. The Amsterdam-based organisation, which aims to put the circular economy into action, published this figure in its 2023 Circularity Gap Report and it said 7.2% means the world is heading in the wrong direction. It has published these reports for six years in a row. The circularity figure for the global economy in 2018 was 9.1%; this fell to 8.6% in 2020, and now it is 7.2%.

It blames rising material extraction for the widening gap and concludes that the global economy still relies almost exclusively on using virgin materials to make products. As a result, according to the foundation’s calculations, more than 90% of materials are either wasted, lost or remain unavailable for reuse for years. For Nienke Steen, who leads on apparel, textiles and footwear at the Cradle To Cradle Product Innovation Institute, these are “devastating facts”.

At the 2023 Sustainable Leather Forum in Paris in September, Ms Steen said the situation in the fashion industry is that brands and manufacturers keep making more product, keep increasing their carbon emissions and have more and more people “in bad situations in the supply chain”. She says 75% of the products brands bring to market end up in landfill and that only 1% of the industry’s output is upcycled. Her conclusion is that it is clearly very difficult “to connect consumer habits to changing the world”.

Do things differently

She remains passionate about the circular economy cause and is optimistic that new legislative requirements, particularly those that oblige companies to produce third-party, data-supported verification of the green claims they make about their products, will make a difference. She is also optimistic about the Cradle To Cradle Product Innovation Institute’s work with brands, encouraging them to do things differently, usually away from the public eye.

She explains that the institute, a non-profit organisation, is the holder of the Cradle To Cradle Certified standard that grew out of the work that Dr Michael Braungart and Dr William McDonough began to do in the 1990s to encourage product manufacturers to become waste-free and to enrich ecosystems in the course of making the things they want to sell. The standard first emerged in 2005. “It’s a product standard,” Nienke Steen emphasises, “not a company standard.” She says the organisation is expanding because circularity “is a hot topic that will not go away”, and she insists that Cradle To Cradle is “a pathway towards circularity”.

The connection is strong, she says, because, while the institute has a vision of a world in which products are made in ways that maximise health and wellbeing for people and the planet, its lead person for apparel, textiles and footwear believes it is also possible to sum up what it does in the following way: “We just want to drive the circular economy in the area where it’s most needed, which is how we design and make our products. That’s where the impact is.”

Components as nutrients

This brings into focus just how important are product designers because it is they who decide on how products are made, which has, in the eyes of Ms Steen, clear links to raw materials choice and use. “We look at these components as nutrients,” she says. “We have to be able to disassemble them in order to recycle or upcycle them. I don’t see leather as a by-product or as a waste product. It is a nutrient, a beautiful, durable, valuable nutrient that we can use over and over again.”

She thinks the leather industry is doing a good job in emphasising the repairability of products made from leather and their second-hand value, but she calls for training on this for design teams and for chief executives and other directors to increase awareness of this and to prepare for the recycling and biodegradation opportunities that she is certain lie ahead. Increased knowledge is essential if we are to take the score in the Circularity Gap Report up again and to “transform to this different economic system”. This training is clearly necessary, she argues, because after decades of companies  bemoaning the damage the fashion industry does to the planet and to communities in their favoured places of production, it is still the margins that drive product development. However, company directors are accountable for what happens in their businesses. “Reducing is not the solution,” she insists. “Recreation is, rethinking how we can deliver something beneficial to our planet when we create products. It really is possible.”

Examples in the leather sector

Companies that are already working with the Cradle To Cradle Product Innovation Institute are providing good examples of this, its apparel, textiles and footwear leader says. She includes leather chemicals manufacturer Smit & Zoon for its Zeology chrome-free, heavy metal-free and aldehyde-free tanning system based on the mineral zeolite. Another she mentions is Reutlingen-based Wet-green for its tanning agent Wet-green OBE 1, used for Olivenleder (certification is for individual products, not companies, remember).

A third of the companies the institute is already working with, Danish footwear brand Roccamore, took part with Nienke Steen at the 2023 Sustainable Leather Forum. Its director of design and product development, Signe Marie Bakka Backhaus, immediately told the audience: “I think leather is a wonderful, natural material that we should all value and appreciate.” She explained that Roccamore’s commitment to Cradle To Cradle has helped the brand “do things differently”. The framework is extensive and the footwear brand has worked its way through it, starting with a collection that used vegetable-tanned leather and went from there to be one of the first finished product companies to work with traceable leather supplier Spoor on a capsule collection it launched at the start of 2021 and, fittingly, called Traceability.

Spoor itself had spun off the previous autumn from semi-finished leather manufacturer and the developer of a laser technology-based system for marking and identifying hides, Scan-Hide. The technology allowed information about each hide, including details of the farm it came from, to withstand wet-end processes in Denmark, transportation to Italy for finishing, shipment to a partner footwear manufacturer, also in Italy, and, finally, delivery to Roccamore back in Denmark. Each shoe in the Traceability collection had a quick-response code printed on the inside to allow customers to find out “the full back-story” of where the leather came from.

Desire for traceability

By the end of 2023, Ms Backhaus reveals, 30% of Roccamore’s entire range will be traceable in exactly this way. “We want to share the information,” she explains. In 2023, as we reported in World Leather August-September, there is extra information to share as a result of Spoor’s links to Scan-Hide and Scan-Hide’s links to parent company, Danish Crown, a supplier of beef and pork to many markets around the world under the control of around 5,600 farmers.

Spoor, which uses the term Nordic Traceable Leather to describe its product offering, says detailed information that Danish Crown collects from every field on every farm is now part of its traceability programme. It now has access to accurate carbon footprint data for every one of its hides and has begun making the figures available for brands to incorporate into their work on environmental, social, and corporate governance. Nienke Steen refers to this as product circularity data. Once again, Roccamore is one of the first brands to seize the chance to share the data with consumers and Ms Backhaus has a clear idea of what the commitment of the footwear brand and its partners, and the available technology, can achieve in the near future.

She envisages being able to put together a collection that uses leather from, exclusively, hides from cattle that grew up on regenerative farms. She believes she will be able to specify the type of hide she wants and the type of farm she wants it to come from. The system can do the rest: source the hides, laser-mark them and trace them all the way through leather manufacturing, shoemaking, shipping and shopping. Then the story Roccamore can tell its customers will be even more riveting.

Nienke Steen at the 2023 Sustainable Leather Forum in Paris.
Credit: Sustainable Leather Forum

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