No place for greenwashing in leather industry report
A new social and environmental report on the leather sector, published by industry body COTANCE and trade union organisation industriAll Europe at the start of December, goes out of its way to present the opposite of greenwashing.
Information included in the report is a figure for the average consumption of water in European tanneries of 0.121 cubic-metres per square-metre of finished leather. The figure comes directly from tanneries; 79 leather manufacturing companies from 11 European countries submitted data on their water usage between 2016 and 2018 and the authors of the report worked out the average.
This figure represents a reduction of 7% in tanners’ consumption of water compared to the figures in an initial social and environmental report, published in 2012.
It is more than 100 times less than a figure for water consumption that online fashion retail company Farfetch offers for leather. In the summer of 2020, Farfetch launched a new fashion footprint tool to help customers look for “long-lasting, lower-impact materials”.
Unfortunately, the tool offers no means of calculating how long-lasting different materials are. It offers figures for the carbon footprint and water consumption of eight different materials.
On water, the Farfetch tool calculates that, while a kilo of polyester or nylon would consume 78 litres of water, the corresponding figure for a kilo of leather would be 17,093 litres.
Farfetch uses different parameters to the ones COTANCE and industriAll have used. Converting these to be able to offer a like-for-like comparison, we have worked out that the fashion footprint tool’s figure for the water consumption required to make one square-metre of finished leather would be 131.484 cubic-metres.
What’s more, the leather industry’s 2020 report has left its figures for water consumption on the high side. It has done this deliberately and has, therefore, chosen to avoid greenwashing and to prefer complete transparency.
The point is that, in 2020, the surveys from which the report has been compiled included more companies that process from raw hides and skins to finished leather than the previous report did. The first parts of the leather-making process consume more water than any other. For this reason, having a higher number of what the report calls “full-cycle companies” means the average figure for 2020 is higher than it would have been if exactly the same companies had submitted their data for both reports, 2012 and 2020.
Rather than make any adjustment to the data for the sake of presenting a more direct comparison between 2012 and 2020, the report has deliberately published the higher figure.
