Leather a water champion, Friends of the Earth report shows
13/05/2015
The report, released at the start of May, highlights seven everyday consumer products and attempts to analyse their impact on the environment by giving details of the land use and water use required to manufacture them. One of the products is a pair of boots made from Brazilian leather.
Using data from London-based consultancy Trucost, Mind Your Steps says it would require more than 14,000 litres of water and 50 square-metres of land to produce enough leather (calculated at 0.46 square-metres) to make the single pair of leather boots under scrutiny. These figures contrast starkly with ones World Leather is publishing in its Nothing To Hide series of open-access essays, which point to 23 litres of water for this amount of leather and less than one square-metre of land.
The enormous discrepancy in the figures for water can only be partly explained by Trucost’s insistence on including a large share of a cow’s consumption of water in the upstream supply chain in the figure for leather and Nothing To Hide’s focus on what happens after a hide leaves the abattoir. The debate about how much of a share of the upstream carbon footprint leather ought to take is ongoing in and around the leather industry itself (many people believe zero is fair; others that a single-figure percentage that is in keeping with the economic value of the hide as a share of the overall value of the cow would be fairer). But even with this, Friends of the Earth’s published figure of 14,500 litres of water to produce 0.46 square-metres of leather has been described not just as too high but as “absurd” by senior figures in the leather industry.
Closer examination of the statements in the Mind Your Step report show a distinction between blue water (from freshwater sources), green water (from rain or snow) and grey water (post-use water that manufacturers can use to dilute effluent). What is interesting for the leather industry is that it is only when the report concentrates on blue water that it makes a specific reference to what happens inside the four walls of the tannery.
The starting figure may be “absurd”, but of the total of 14,500 litres of water Trucost and Friends of the Earth claim are required to make 0.46 square-metres of leather, the volume of blue water is 506 litres and only 4% of this volume of blue water is consumed in the tannery, just over 20 litres. Of the “absurd” 14,500-litre total, then, even the report’s authors recognise that only 0.14% of the total is directly attributable to the work that tanners do.
There is always room for improvement and the leather industry needs to keep making inroads into its use of water and all other resources, but Mind Your Step sets out to criticise the leather industry and its customers for their use of water and in the end its own figures show that making leather uses up such a small proportion of all the water in the cattle value chain that it’s practically negligible.
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