Leather industry to set up its own environmental impact database
A coalition of global leather industry bodies, headed by the International Council of Tanners (ICT), has welcomed “the positive tone and the openness to dialogue” that it has seen in communication it has received from the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) in recent weeks.
Leading leather industry bodies wrote to the SAC on October 8 to ask it to suspend the score the non-profit organisation applies to leather in its Higg Materials Sustainability Index (MSI). The Higg Index is widely used by fashion brands and manufacturers to inform their materials selection.
The SAC’s initial response was to refuse, but it said leather industry bodies and companies in the leather value chain can submit data that will, perhaps, help the SAC “improve the tools” it uses to compile the Higg Index. Executive director, Amina Razvi, has since followed up, ICT said, and appears “open to dialogue”. Plans are already under way for an online meeting to take place.
On November 2, SAC issued a press release saying it had decided to “accelerate the retirement of the aggregated single score from the Higg ” for leather and for all materials. This will happen on January 4. From then, the MSI will show five impact area scores for each material. The ICT reacted by saying that the main leather industry bodies remain concerned because “the underlying data and methods for the five impact areas do not truly represent the impact of some materials”.
It said: “The leather industry recognises the laudable intention of the Higg tools: to inform apparel, footwear, and home interior designers and developers that wish to make more sustainable materials choices. However, ICT reasserts its belief that the use of inappropriate methodologies and out-of-date, unrepresentative, inaccurate and incomplete data, means that leather has been burdened with disproportionately high Higg Index scores, which does not reflect its sustainable, circular nature.”
It added that the leather industry plans to assess the feasibility of setting up “a leather-specific sectoral database”, to provide operators, customers, academia and the wider public, with “robust data on the environmental impact of leather”.
