COTANCE calls for volunteers to determine leather’s carbon footprint
19/07/2013
At the core of its application is COTANCE’s conviction that the start of the lifecycle of leather is in the slaughterhouse, where hides and skins are recovered as a by-product of the meat industry. “There should be no carry-over of any environmental burden from livestock breeding to the leather industry,” the organisation insists.
General secretary of COTANCE, Gustavo González-Quijano, said on announcing the development: “This is a unique opportunity for the global leather industry to get fair Product Category Rules (PCR) that recognise the system boundaries that the UNIDO leather and leather products panel overwhelmingly endorsed last autumn in Shanghai for our sector. In this context the leather industry is challenging conventional thinking. Only through a united industry position will we succeed.”
More broadly, the European Commission wants to test the scale of the environmental footprinting of products across the EU and has agreed to fund a number of pilot initiatives to do this. It has invited companies and organisations responsible for various product categories to volunteer to take part; COTANCE wants the leather industry to be one of the sectors to volunteer.
This could lead to an official framework for “hammering out” the sector’s Product Category Rules, Mr González Quijano said, adding that the framework would have global reach. He said an official framework in the European Union could be “an important parameter” and “a trendsetter” for the global leather industry.
He called on other leather industry bodies around the world and “like-minded stakeholders” everywhere to send letters of support for COTANCE to present with its application, saying: “The more international and inter-sector support COTANCE can show at the time of application the more influential leather can become in the process. This is a win-win exercise where the leather industry is the real winner.”
COTANCE has drawn up a template for a letter of support and has asked companies and organisations all over the world to respond quickly, putting their details into the template, creating their own document on their own headed notepaper and sending it back to COTANCE for submission to the EU.
Organisations or individuals who believe that they can play a part in helping COTANCE develop environmental Product Category Rules for leather by being part of the technical secretariat the organisation wants to set up, can express this extra support in their letters.
We will publish a separate story on leatherbiz on July 19, 2013, explaining the background to this idea in more detail.
Share this story:
