New World Leather Podcast: the LCA debate must move on
We have published a new edition of the World Leather Podcast and it is now available on Anchor, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and four other platforms.
This podcast offers an audio version of our recent Leather Leaders interview with Milan-based consultant Federico Brugnoli; we hope you enjoy listening to it.
It’s an important interview because it challenges the idea of being able to present the carbon footprint of leather by extracting a single number from a lifecycle assessment (LCA) exercise. Federico Brugnoli has been carrying out work to introduce LCA to the leather industry for a number of years. Now he says he wants companies to move beyond the numbers resulting from an LCA exercise.
“We are working on the concept of lifecycle thinking,” he explains in the interview. “The numbers coming out are not the end. They are the start of an improvement plan. Customers are sitting with the tanners and they’re looking at the impact improvement plans can have on the reduction of carbon footprint.”
Recent announcements from groups such as PrimeAsia indicate that lifecycle thinking is already taking root among leather manufacturers. The company recently completed an LCA exercise; it took 12 months, covered 266 processes phases and involved collecting 3,000 data points from operations in five different countries.
PrimeAsia has confirmed to World Leather that it chose not to pick any single number from the exercise to use as a means of showing a low carbon footprint for the leather it produces. It said it thought this would be an over-simplification.
Instead, it wants to use the LCA to have “better and more detailed discussions with our customers”. It said it believed that delivering the information to customers in a more detailed way would help the finished product companies that use its leather understand fully that they were making low-carbon material choices.
