Carbon footprint tool on the way
It has taken years of trying, but a tool that will help tanners calculate the carbon footprint of their leather is on the way at last.
Years of effort to turn the hard work of establishing product environmental footprint category rules (PEFCR) for leather into a tool that tanners can use in their day-to-day work are about to bear fruit.
In addition to its successful introduction of standard EN 16887 on the carbon footprint of leather, which was approved in 2016, the industry’s representative body in the European Union, COTANCE, began years of work on PEFCR in 2013. Helped and informed by national industry associations and other partners, it succeeded in producing a baseline model for calculating the environmental footprint of leather, establishing rules that will allow individual companies to work out product-specific results in 16 different impact categories (of which carbon footprint is the best known) for the different types of leather they manufacture. In 2018, this work received official approval from the European Union.
As part of this process, COTANCE then went to work on preparing all the PEFCR documentation for a technology partner to develop into an easy-to-use tool. In September 2019, it announced that this preparation was complete. A number of other industries that had successfully walked the long, hard PEFCR road submitted their data too; it all went to an external technology partner that the European Commission had appointed and funded to produce calculation tools for leather and the other sectors. But the technology partner failed to deliver and in 2020 it abandoned the project, leaving tanners high and dry.
Valuable work
Far too much effort had gone into PEFCR to let all the work go to waste. In 2023, when COTANCE secured support from the EU for a new project, Green Deal Leather, it quickly saw the possibility of making the carbon footprint of leather part of the discussion again. This new project (full name: Towards Zero Adverse Impact of the European Leather Industry – Green Deal Leather) launched in Milan in September with a particular focus on workplace safety and on carbon footprint.
Representatives of the industry from Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, Hungary, Italy and Germany are involved in the discussions, along with COTANCE and trade union organisation IndustriAllEurope. It was an earlier “social dialogue” project involving these participants in 2022 that gave rise to Green Deal Leather. This is all part of an unbroken thread of initiatives through which the industry has sought to present leather manufacturing as being safe for workers and safe for the environment, while producing a high-quality, versatile, valuable material and sustaining millions of direct and indirect jobs across the world.
Workplace safety was the centrepiece of the inaugural gathering in Milan. The second of three project meetings took place in Frankfurt at the end of January and the focus this time was firmly on the carbon footprint of bovine leather. The highlight, COTANCE said afterwards, was the presentation, at last, of a tool for measuring carbon footprint. The new tool builds on the previous EN 16887 and PEFCR work, but also on ECO2L, a parallel initiative that one of the project partners, the German Leather Federation (VDL), has been running successfully for the last 12 years.
A global solution
In 2012, ECO2L launched as a label that would present finished leather as being “energy controlled”, hence the name. From the outset, VDL says, this label had behind it accurate calculations of the energy efficiency and carbon emissions of leather manufacturing facilities, a world first, the organisation insists. Tanneries in Germany and elsewhere (companies in other parts of Europe, as well as in China, Indonesia and Uruguay, have engaged with the programme) continue to undergo regular audits to be able to present ECO2L certification to their customers. Now, COTANCE has confirmed that a new version of the label that VDL announced in 2022, an upgrade on the previous version, will be at the core of the new carbon footprint tool. It particularly likes that the tool will, therefore, be made by tanners for tanners.
This is a positive development,” COTANCE says. “We are taking the upgrade of ECO2L data collection protocol and making it into an official tool for the global leather industry. The new tool is an instrument developed from scratch by the leather industry.” Its hope is that the tool can “empower tanners to benchmark their carbon footprint against an EU average, aiding them in their journey towards more sustainable practices”. The initiative is rooted in Europe, but it is clear that the partners believe it can empower tanners in all parts of the world to improve sustainability.
The discussion in Frankfurt, involved the project partners, as well as representatives of the industry in Turkey and the UK. It covered details of the work involved in calculating the average against which users of the new tool will benchmark their products’ carbon footprint.
Original aims
VDL managing director, Andreas Meyer, has told World Leather that the main aim of ECO2L was always to improve energy efficiency. Version 2.0, he explains, is still about making tanneries more energy-efficient, which he insists means more than simply reducing the total amount of energy they consume. After the upgrade to ECO2L 2.0, this now includes scope-three data. Scope three brings the impact from external suppliers into the calculation, including data from the chemicals that tanners use to make leather. “As a result,” Mr Meyer says, “you get the figures for energy consumption, but you get the carbon footprint for the product-mix of the tannery as well.”
He adds that, carrying out regular audits over the years has enabled VDL to see that tanneries have become steadily more efficient. In parallel, the leather manufacturers themselves have been able to see their own results and benchmark them against industry averages. This, Mr Meyer insists, has opened their eyes to the opportunities that can arise from investing in greater energy efficiency.
He explains: “Our VDL members, the people who run the tanneries, wanted to compare themselves with others in a fair and reliable way in terms of energy consumption. They wanted to save energy where it made sense, and save money in the process. Customers then began asking what carbon footprint the production of leather had and we saw that ECO2L could provide a reliable basis for this calculation too.”
Make it manageable
Secretary general of COTANCE, Gustavo Gonza´lez- Quijano, says the project team is putting “the utmost care” into the task of bringing ECO2L into the workings of the Green Deal Leather project. The new ECO2L data collection protocol generates a large amount of information and, for the tool to work well, it is important to provide “all the necessary explanations”. Distilling this down “to the essentials” is important, he points out, because understanding carbon footprint details and all the environmental implications that arise from them is complex. “Simply comparing one number here with another there without the corresponding context often leads to wrong conclusions,” he warns. The final Green Deal Leather project conference will take place in Brussels on May 16.
Current COTANCE president, Manuel Ríos Navarro, who runs Spanish leather manufacturing group Inpelsa, expresses hope on behalf of his peers that the new tool will produce results that help customers and end-consumers understand leather’s carbon footprint better. However, he too makes the argument that this is about more than a single calculation or a rounded-up number. “The carbon footprint of leather also reflects the technology we use to produce it,” he explains, “and the work we do to ensure long use of the material. The true environmental impact of leather depends, after all, on the length of time the material stays in use. In this, leather is a true champion.”
It has also taken a long time to arrive at the point that Green Deal Leather is close to reaching now. The combination of these two strands of the industry’s work over more than a decade is going to culminate in the creation of a new carbon footprint tool that will benefit tanners everywhere. The project partners are in no doubt that it will be worth the wait. “ECO2L was created on a voluntary basis by tanners who, the whole time, still had to continue their normal work,” Andreas Meyer concludes. “They did this with the support of a non-profit organisation. All of this meant the costs for the users had to remain low. Sometimes, to develop things like this successfully, it has to be at the expense of speed.”
Boots from outdoor brand Lundhags that use ECO2L-certified leather from Lederfabrik Josef Heinen in Germany.
Credit: Lundhags
