Audi will stick to “unfair” method for calculating leather’s carbon footprint
19/04/2017
Speaking at the Lectra Automotive Leather conference in Bordeaux on April 19, Mr Gathmann revealed that Lectra has carried out a lifecycle assessment of the 2015 model of its A7 car in keeping with ISO standard 14040. This exercise resulted in a calculation of 40 tonnes of CO2 equivalent as the environmental footprint of the car over its lifecycle, covering its development, its production and assembly, its use over 200,000 kilometres and the recycling of as much of the material as possible after use. Mr Gathmann said that the A7 uses around 10 square-metres of finished leather in the interior, which, at 50 kilos of CO2 equivalent per square-metre, gives a carbon footprint of the leather the car consumes of 500 kilos.
This corresponds to 1.25% of the car’s total, which is a small share, but it was immediately clear from what Henning Gathmann said in Bordeaux that the leather industry will see two difficulties with the figure.
Of these, the first is that he confirmed that 50 kilos of CO2 equivalent per square-metre is also the figure that Audi attributes to some of the synthetic materials that automotive brands often choose to use instead of leather, suggesting that leather is no more sustainable than these synthetics.
The second difficulty is that Audi accepts that only 25% of the footprint it attributes to leather is attributable to the production of the leather itself, with the other 75% coming from agricultural activities and livestock. “Of course this is not fair,” Mr Gathmann said at the conference, “because it assumes cattle are slaughtered to make leather when the hide is simply a by-product of the food industry.”
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