COTANCE call for support receives high-level response
25/07/2013
A week before the deadline, COTANCE called on July 18 for stakeholders throughout the global leather industry to support its application for an EU project to clarify environmental labelling in products in the leather supply chain.
This left little time for organisations to react, but COTANCE explained it had waited to secure approval for the idea from its own members, the national leather industry associations of various EU member countries, before making the call to the wider industry.
Nevertheless, the ICT and the China Leather Industry Association were among a large number of stakeholders to send formal support. The industry will now have to wait to see if leather is one of the industries the European Commission chooses to take part in pilot projects to address the question of what constitutes an environmentally friendly product.
In encouraging organisations all over the world to lend support to the idea, COTANCE general secretary, Gustavo González Quijano, said: “What would it cost the leather industry to stay absent from this debate about system boundaries? We have seen the results of previous attempts to calculate the carbon footprint of leather using conventional methodologies that include the livestock phase. According to these, leather always scores worse than synthetic materials. The sustainability of leather in its competition for market-share with other materials is at stake here.”
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