COTANCE produces 150-page ‘green product’ final draft
05/03/2018
This exercise, which has taken five years to complete, is part of a wider European effort to give formal recognition to a number of products as environmentally friendly. Members of the European Commission will decide in April which products are to earn this status.
The draft document, almost 150 pages long, contains a huge amount of data and detail to support the industry’s claim that leather is an environmentally desireable material for finished product manufacturers to use. COTANCE recognised the importance of achieving formal recognition of this when the opportunity first arose in 2013 and it pointed out right away that this exercise and the work that has gone into it can be of use to tanners and users of leather everywhere in the world.
One of the reasons the PEFCR exercise has been of such value is that it uses scientific facts and huge volumes of data to argue that efforts by other industries and some campaign groups to attribute to leather a considerable share of a hide’s upstream carbon footprint are unfair. The determining product of livestock breeding is meat, the draft report says, and demand for hides “has no influence” on decisions livestock farmers and meat companies take on expansion of cattle herds.
COTANCE has explained that final submission of the draft will be on March 19, leaving only a short time now for last comments. In a fluid five years, there have been many changes to the type of data the European Commission has demanded as well as substantial changes to the format in which it wanted participating industries to present the information.
Secretary general, Gustavo Gonzalez-Quijano, has paid particular tribute to Italy’s national tanning industry association, UNIC, and in particular to UNIC’s Primiano de Rosa and Andrea Fontanella, and consultancy Ergo Srl, for working hard to complete the draft in what he called the “frenetic run-up” to the deadline.
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