Carbon footprint: ‘zero allocation’ idea for hides is dead
24/03/2017
This is part of a wider European Union initiative to define what makes a ‘green product’, for which the European Commission has funded a series of pilot exercises to examine the environmental footprint of a range of products.
A meeting involving the initiatives steering committee, a number of European Commission directorates and representatives of a range of industries took place in Brussels on March 21. COTANCE has confirmed that a vote took place on the idea of ‘zero allocation’ for hides, but that a majority of delegates at the meeting voted against the proposal or abstained.
“The vote closes the aspirations of our pilot for zero-allocation,” COTANCE said after the meeting. “We will have to adopt an economic allocation [instead].”
In better news, however, the organisation was able to report that the economic allocation tanners will be asked to attribute to hides when calculating the carbon footprint of their leather will be low, approximately 0.4% (because most of the economic value benefits the dairy and meat industries). And it reported that an alternative suggested by the meat industry would have left leather appearing to have a far bigger carbon footprint.
Representatives of the meat industry asked the Brussels meeting to use mass as the basis for allocating each industry’s share of carbon emissions. They had calculated that 50% of the mass of a cow is attributable to the wide range of by-products (including the hide) that cattle slaughter generates, meaning meat’s share of the upstream carbon footprint would have been substantially reduced. There was no support for this proposal either, leaving the meat industry’s representatives frustrated.
Image: US Department of Agriculture
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