Greenpeace takes its stick to Argentine leather association
22/08/2011
For a number of weeks, Greepeace has been openly critical of tanneries in the Buenos Aires region that it claims are responsible for contamination in a river there, the Matanza-Riachuelo. It then used a familiar tactic of focusing most of its public anger on finished product brands that are customers of the tanneries, suggesting that it feels tanneries do not have a high enough public profile to allow Greenpeace to create sufficient headlines through a campaign against them. During Buenos Aires Fashion Week at the start of August, it set up an alternative catwalk to denounce two fashion companies in particular, apparel brand Prüne and footwear specialist Grimoldi, for their use of leather produced along the banks of the Riachuelo.
It followed this up with an online campaign to encourage the public to send their protests to both companies. The home page of its Argentinean website still said on August 22: ‘Grimoldi and Prüne are contaminating the Riachuelo. Demand that they stop it.’
In mid-August, the president of a leather industry organisation called CIMA, Raúl Zylbersztein, responded to media enquiries about the Greenpeace campaign by pointing out that there were plenty of tanneries and leathergoods companies in Argentina that were providing large numbers of jobs while being responsible for no pollution whatsoever and said it was unfair for Greenpeace to tar everyone with the same brush.
He pointed out that industrial pollution of the river went on for 100 years, with many different industries contributing. The widely reported fact that most of the present instances of contamination are being traced to saturated soil in the river basin reflects this. In the 1990s, the government promised to fund a project to clean the river up, but this has resulted in little progress and even a court-case over accusations of misuse of the funds. Subsequent projects have delivered recent successes in improving the quality of the water, Mr Zylbersztein pointed out, and he complained that Greenpeace had made no mention of any of these points, preferring to pontificate on the leather industry’s role as “the principal cause of the grave environmental state of emergency that the region faces” (a statement for which the Greenpeace website presents no evidence, scientific or otherwise).
A day after Mr Zylbersztein’s comments appeared in Argentine media, Greenpeace responded by saying CIMA should take a leaf out of the major sportswear brands’ book in the China case because, in contrast to CIMA’s “reproaching our activities”, Puma and Nike had “recognised their responsibility after being denounced publicly”.
Greenpeace Argentina said specifically that it was not calling for companies such as Grimoldi and Prüne to use synthetic materials instead of leather, only that leading brands should adopt policies to reduce and, in time, eliminate the use of toxic and polluting substances along their supply chains.
It gave no recognition of the fact that almost every company in the global leather industry has been attempting to do just this for many years, with many examples of great success.
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