LHCA’s role in New York Times article on Higg Index
The president of the Leather and Hide Council of America (LHCA), Stephen Sothmann, has revealed that the organisation put substantial effort into convincing New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi to run an article about the raw deal that leather and other materials receive in the Higg Materials Sustainability Index (MSI).
Ms Tabuchi’s article, which appeared in the newspaper on June 12, has generated intense debate in the arena of sustainable fashion and has drawn a formal response from the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, which set up the Higg MSI in 2011.
“We worked with this reporter for over a year to get this story told,” Mr Sothmann said, “and we hope it will spur more thoughtful conversations about sustainability in the fashion world.”
In further comments, he insisted there is no validity in presenting the substitution of leather with alternative materials, especially those made from fossil fuels, as a sustainable move.
“At its core,” Mr Sothmann said, “the leather industry is a recycling industry, taking a natural, inevitable by-product of food production and turning it into a usable, durable, and sustainable material that looks good too.”
He thanked The New York Times for taking “a deep look into the issues facing the industry”, including competition from plastic, and for highlighting “the unfortunate reality of perfectly good hides and skins being wastefully sent to landfills”.
