“Obscenely overestimated”: L&HCA says brands that have reduced their use of leather because of false perceptions about its climate impact need to rethink their positions.

The Leather and Hide Council of America (L&HCA) has said at an influential event in London that many finished product brands need to change their thinking about leather. Brands that have decreased their use of leather or stopped using the material entirely after seeing false claims about carbon footprint need to think again, the organisation has said. 

At the Sustainability Week Summit run by business publication The Economist in London in March, L&HCA revealed that calculations that brands might have seen for the climate impact of leather have been “obscenely over-estimated”. It said that a new study on the environmental impact of cow hide production in the US will show that figures included in the Higg Materials Sustainability Index (MSI) over-estimate leather’s climate impact many times over.

MSI is a tool that the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (now called Cascale) launched in 2012. It has been used extensively by fashion companies to make and to justify decisions on which materials to use to make their products. The International Council of Tanners said in 2020 that manufacturers were “deselecting leather in favour of fossil fuel-derived, unsustainable synthetic products” on the basis of the unfair score the MSI gives leather.

Independent study

At the London event, L&HCA said it had funded a new, independent study into the carbon footprint of making leather from US cow hides, focusing on wet blue produced in the US from US hides and shipped to Latin America or Asia to be made into finished leather. It was conducted, using lifecycle assessment (LCA) methodology, by Dr Greg Thoma, director of agricultural modelling and lifecycle assessment at Colorado State University. It took into account water use, eutrophication, greenhouse gas emissions, toxicity to humans, ozone depletion and the impact of chemicals on land and water.

The study’s first phase concluded that there has been a lack of data transparency and a serious overstatement of the relative environmental impact of cattle hides and leather. The final report will be available later this year and will be subject to peer review. Incoming acting president of L&HCA, Kerry Brozyna, says: “When the study is complete, we will publish our modelling and share inputs and results. Our desire is to provide scientifically tested information to our stakeholders so they can make the best decisions for their consumers, their businesses and the planet.”

At The Economist’s Sustainability Week summit, L&HCA vice-president Kevin Latner told business leaders in the audience: “We were pleased to see that processing hides, a natural waste material, delivers a low carbon footprint. The new data shows that leather can be a renewable, sustainable material and suggests that it is better for the environment than oil-derived synthetics.”

Credible and transparent

He says the wider fashion industry needs to follow best practice in environmental impact assessments and publish “credible and transparent data to inform discussions”. He insists that this will make it easier for businesses and consumers to make informed purchasing decisions.

Mr Latner explains that choosing The Economist event as a good forum for presenting L&HCA’s new information came from a desire to put a strong message about the value of leather in front of a broader business audience. He argues that the senior decision makers at many brands and retail companies are, in some ways, “outside the echo chambers of sustainability and corporate social responsibility”. They take sustainability seriously, but it is one consideration alongside many other important factors, including financing, in a wider examination of the future of their production strategies.

Travelling to London and attaching the launch to the prestige of one of the best known names in global business media also reflects the confidence L&HCA has in this new data. “We know that there might be a need to change some of the numbers here and there when the finished report comes out,” he says, “but we know the magnitude is going to be of the same order.”

Time well spent

The Leather and Hide Council of America took its time in deciding to put together this new LCA report. In fact, it is part of an exercise into finding the best way to communicate about sustainability that began in 2017. L&HCA’s initial view was that it made no sense for it to carry out its own LCA exercise. “They are expensive,” Mr Latner accepts, “and they are not super-accurate; they just happen to be the best tool available. But later we came round to the idea and we started seeking funding in late 2021 or 2022 to carry out an LCA. It has taken around two years, first to get the funding and then to build the industry support for this. Because there are already LCAs for corn, soybeans, animal production, tanning and so on, we decided that we could base our work, as much as possible, on the studies that already exist.”

Working in this way gave the council advantages in terms of time and money in putting its study together compared to gathering all-new data from scratch. Enough detail was there already for it to present data from field to finished product. Following this, it carried out wardrobe studies and other ways of gaining insight into how consumers use leather and why. “When we talk about durability, it’s not just about physical durability,” Mr Latner continues, “but also psychological durability and the use of leather over time.” He travelled to London with leather shoes that he bought in 1997 in his luggage. “Synthetic doesn’t hold up as well as this,” he points out.

Model of expertise

Lead author of the study, Dr Thoma, has been lending his expertise to the US Department of Agriculture and to international bodies for more than a decade. In addition to his role at Colorado State, he has been teaching modelling and LCA methodology at the University of Arkansas since the 1990s. He has worked as a scientist in the agricultural research service, carrying out data modelling of animal production, focusing specifically on beef and dairy cattle in the US. In building up these data models, he has interviewed livestock farmers at hundreds of farms throughout the US, focusing on three distinct phases of these farmers’ operations. There is the cow-calf phase and then, once the animals are weaned, they’ll go into a dairy herd or, for beef cattle, onto a range. Beef cattle will spend in the region of eight months or a year in the fields to graze and build themselves up to a certain size, after which they will, typically, go to a feedlot to finish growing. When they reach the size the packers are looking for, the animals go for slaughter.

Challenges from an LCA perspective include how best to account for transportation and animals moving between different regions of the US. For beef cattle, Dr Thoma’s study considers the separate regions of the US. It takes into account the production practices prevalent in each one, and then integrates that data into a single model. Dr Thoma was also the International Dairy Association’s principal author for studies that have calculated the allocation factors across beef and dairy, resulting in an international standard for the allocation of impact categories between the two types of cattle. “He was one of the primary scientists involved in developing that,” Kevin Latner says. “We have used that as the source data on the dairy side of the L&HCA study.”

A range of views

He adds that the study also shines a light on a common claim that range-fed cattle has a lower impact than feedlot-finished cattle. Feedlot-finished cattle also spend most of their lives on the range, of course. The L&HCA study involved visits to two farms in Maryland to examine up close the environmental impact of the operations there and compare them to the regional and national averages that the data has produced. Kevin Latner says it was no surprise to him that the new study shows the environmental impact of feedlot-finished animals to be lower.

He believes the clarity the new study offers on this matter will be of benefit to the industry. “One of the advantages, from a sustainability perspective, is that when you feed-finish an animal, you are able to shorten its lifecycle,” he explains. “You increase the weight-gain over a shorter period of time. Time or lifespan is one of the key factors in terms of the environmental impact of the animal. For range-fed, you increase the overall lifespan of the animal by between 12 and 18 months.”

Far too high

Without question, though, the most revealing statistic to come from the new LCA is the indication that the Higg MSI’s figures for the environmental impact of leather are far too high. Mr Latner explains how L&HCA came to this conclusion, pointing out that it comes from a detailed analysis of the numbers the Higg Index lists for four impact categories for leather: global warming potential, eutrophication, fossil fuel use and water scarcity.

He says: “We looked at these four impact categories and then we looked at the numbers that are in the Higg Index for output. It gives a number of kilogrammes of CO2-equivalent for each of them. We were able to look at their LCA methodology and then apply the same methodology to our data. We were able to get output based on our data and to compare the numbers. That is what we have been able to do. But they are not transparent with their data and there is a variety of factors that could be different. We would only know the reasons for the difference if we were able to look at their data.”

The figures that emerge from this suggest that the Higg MSI overstates the global warming potential of leather by 640%,  eutrophication by 350%, fossil fuel use by 660%, and water scarcity by 9800%.

The way forward for the Higg

Asked where he believes this leaves the Higg MSI with regard to leather, he says he sees three possible ways forward. Cascale could share its data and attempt to clarify why the disparity between its figures and L&HCA’s is so huge. It could use the data that Dr Thoma and L&HCA have put together now and recalculate its score for leather. Or it could stop offering brands and retailers a score for leather. Any brand or retailer that wants to can use the L&HCA figures for leather instead, Kevin Latner adds. “The Higg Index has a credibility gap,” he concludes. “The Norwegian and Dutch consumer protection authorities have already said that brands cannot make sustainability claims based on the Higg Index. This demonstrates that there is a problem with their underlying data.”

L&HCA is committed to continuing this research, saying it wants this exercise to provide accurate, shareable data for hides from other sources too. It wants to expand the study to bring in more detail of manufacturing practices to set out incentives for using leather and for using off-cuts from the finished leather production process. “We plan on sharing this everywhere we can,” Mr Latner says. “We believe we have a great story to tell, one that can help those in decision-making positions to see that renewable resources are better options.”

L&HCA vice-president Kevin Latner.
Credit: L&HCA

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