Leather’s European partners reject zero allocation for hides
19/02/2015
In the new document, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre made it clear that leather’s partner industries in a project that aims to accord ‘green’ status to leather and a series of other products that come from cattle have so far rejected claims from the leather sector that a hide’s allocation of the upstream carbon footprint of a cow should be zero.
Using a method called System Expansion, leather industry experts have argued that the upstream carbon footprint should be allocated entirely to the principal product for which cattle are raised, which is meat. The meat industry, one of four partner industries taking part in the project, has said it will not accept this.
COTANCE secretary general, Gustavo Gonzalez-Quijano, circulated the document from the Joint Research Centre immediately and said the group representing the leather industry had only one week to submit a response. But he warned: “Comments requesting a zero allocation will certainly be rejected.”
However, one member of the technical secretariat, Milan-based consultant Federico Brugnoli, who first suggested System Expansion as a suitable methodology for the leather industry to use when calculating its carbon footprint, insisted that the document from the Joint Research Centre suggests it could still be possible, in theory, to use System Expansion for the leather industry’s calculation “if data and methodologies are further developed”.
Image shows Federico Brugnoli (left) in discussion with Gustavo Gonzalez-Quijano at the 2014 Tannery of the Year dinner.
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