Fast-fashion thinking damages durability debate
A group that has led lengthy discussions on what constitutes product durability has chosen to ignore fact-based arguments that favour leather and other natural materials.
The leather industry’s main representative body in the European Union, COTANCE, has withdrawn from a group that is working on product environmental footprint category rules (PEFCR) for footwear.
For some time now, COTANCE has been an active member of the technical secretariat that is working to establish category rules for calculating the environmental impact of footwear and apparel products. As part of the group, COTANCE argued that the technical secretariat’s proposed parameters for describing footwear products as durable were far too lax and that this was to the detriment of the leather industry.
Suggestions are that the technical secretariat is seeking to present as “long-lasting” any shoe that can withstand just 100 wears. This has caused alarm in the leather footwear sector because leather shoes are often made to last for thousands of wears. These shoes’ genuine longevity is an important factor in convincing consumers that it is worth paying extra for leather. Leather shoes cost more up front, but if you keep them and wear them for years, they are much better value for money, and far better for the environment in the long run.
Tests to pass
Less than two years ago, then European Commission vice-president for the environment, Virginijus Sinkevicius, told the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen: “Waste generation is growing, fuelled by fast fashion. The average European consumes 12 kilos of clothing and footwear per year. A quarter of that gets exported after use. Most of the rest ends up in landfills or incineration.” He said the Commission wants to have “minimum requirements” for products sold in the EU market, with footwear one of the priority categories. “The key tests to pass are durability, reusability, and repairability,” Mr Sinkevicius continued. Passing these tests is all about encouraging recyclability, closing the loop and preventing the release of microplastics, he insisted, and, crucially, going “from fast fashion to a more long-term, sustainable relationship” with the products we buy and use.
Now COTANCE has said that, despite its efforts to present fact-based arguments in favour taking truly long-lasting materials into consideration as a means of building these sustainable relationships, the technical secretariat has refused to alter its position. As a result, COTANCE, which worked on this with “a global coalition of natural material stakeholders”, has formally announced its withdrawal from the group.
Wholly inadequate
The apparel and footwear PEFCR is now almost certain to include wholly inadequate durability values. “They disproportionately impact slow-fashion products made with natural material such as leather, wool, and cotton,” COTANCE says, “ultimately encouraging brands to deselect these in favour of less sustainable alternatives.” It has also asked for there to be no reference to COTANCE or its representatives on the updated PEFCR documentation so that no one viewing the written material will think there is support from the European leather industry for a methodology it does not endorse.
Secretary-general, Gustavo Gonzalez-Quijano, says COTANCE joined the process in good faith to help build “a fair and science-based environmental framework for fashion”. He adds: “Instead, we’ve witnessed a system that punishes durable, natural materials like leather, exactly the kind of products the circular economy should be encouraging. We cannot stand behind a methodology that promotes fast fashion over long-lasting quality.”
Make the link
Work to establish PEF category rules for footwear and apparel in the European Union started in 2019. The new technical secretariat began its work the following year. COTANCE was an ideal organisation to involve in the group because it had already worked on PEFCR for leather. This took many hours of effort over the period spanning 2013 to 2018, before securing official support from the European Commission for the new rules for calculating the carbon footprint of leather.
A first public consultation on how best to define the rules for calculating the environmental footprint of finished fashion products such as footwear and apparel began in 2021, attracting almost 1,000 comments. Tests to see how some of the technical secretariat’s ideas would work on real products in the real world followed. As far as footwear is concerned, these products included boots as well as open-toed and closed-toe shoes.
The secretariat said early on that it would not seek to address Mr Sinkevicius’s concerns about microplastics, explaining that the methodologies to assess microplastic pollution and plastic leakage “are still under development”. But, at least on paper, it did make durability one of its priorities. “Durability is key to extending the life of apparel and footwear products and thus improving their environmental impacts,” it said. It added that it was taking into account the properties of different materials, for example the abrasion of footwear soles. It also said repairability was important to it, saying that making products easy to repair “promotes reusability and eco-design practices”. But it has not made the link between leather and these two critical characteristics.
Gustavo González-Quijano says COTANCE remains committed to dialogue and hopes still to convince the European Commission to take a more serious stance on durability in forthcoming formal reviews of the PEFCR.
