Puma cannot answer questions about leather claims
25/10/2012
The sports company made its initial claim on Monday, October 8 at an event to celebrate the environmental friendliness of a new non-leather shoe, the InCycle Basket, which it will launch in February 2013. The new shoe, which has an upper made from organic cotton and linen, has an environmental cost of just EUR 2.95, according to Puma’s and Trucost’s calculations.
Because the figure for the Puma Suede is so high, leatherbiz suggested that the two companies may have failed to take into account that the suede in the upper comes from hides that also yield grain leather. In other words, that the calculations Trucost has carried out and Puma has trumpeted to the world attribute too much cost to the material.
The figures are based on assessments of the monetary cost of greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, water use, land use and waste. The figures for the Puma Suede are, respectively (and in euro), 2.16, 0.74, 0.61, 0.48 and 0.30. The corresponding figures for the InCycle Basket are 1.41, 0.84, 0.49, 0.09 and 0.12. Most of the leather’s impact in these areas comes upstream in the supply chain and is based on the lifecycle analysis of livestock, a contentious subject in itself, but part of a different debate.
Sticking with the Trucost model, leatherbiz’s suggestion was that only a proportion of the impact of the leather can be attributed to the suede because a hide that generates these numbers will also provide tanners and leather buyers with grain leather for no additional environmental cost. Trucost responded to this assessment within two days and said it was incorrect.
The London-based consultancy told us: “The lifecycle assessment study that Trucost has used for the processing of hides has already accounted for the mass allocation between different types of leather and the factors that Trucost has applied for the different environmental impacts are for finished leather. With the allocation between different types of leather already being accounted for, Trucost is using factors that relate to finished leather and applying the impact to Puma by mass. This allocation avoids any double-counting.”
We sent a list of 12 follow-up questions in an attempt to understand what this means. We offered to go to London to sit down with Trucost to go over its methodology and try to work out how it had arrived at the figure of EUR 4.29. We received answers within a day, albeit brief ones. This was on Friday, October 12. One of the most significant points to come out of the answers it sent us that day was that the EUR 4.29 refers to the whole shoe, plus packaging, for the whole of its lifecycle. This was far from clear in the original press release, in which there was a clear emphasis on a comparison between the uppers of both products.
Trucost’s conclusion was: “We believe we have analysed the impact of leather and other materials in a scientific and robust manner.” We are unaware of any peer review process that the Trucost process has undergone.
On Monday, October 15, Trucost called us to ask if we were satisfied with its answers and we said no, because we still could not understand how the environmental cost of a pair of Puma Suede could be as high as EUR 4.29, despite the consultancy’s attempts to explain. At the end of that same day, we sent the company a list of seven further questions. To date, ten days later, Trucost has not been able to answer them.
We give a full account of this dialogue in a new entry on the leatherbiz blog.
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