Hide and skin production around the world
Tanners are entirely dependent on a reliable supply of raw material, but this updated first essay in the Nothing to Hide series shows that, without the leather industry, farmers, meat companies and society (including some of the most vulnerable societies on earth) would face serious and expensive challenges over what to do with the hides and skins that consumers’ desire for meat and milk generates. Letting this by-product go to waste would be a bad choice for financial, social and environmental reasons.
Executive summary
The volume of hides and skins coming as a by-product from the global meat industry is enormous. Figures for 2019 from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) suggest the meat industry generates 340 million cattle hides a year, along with 730 million sheepskins and 650 million goatskins. The leather industry buys up a large proportion, though not all, of this by-product and transforms it into one of the most versatile and attractive materials on earth. Unfortunately, millions of hides and skins go to waste.The weight of the hides and skins the meat industry generates each year is almost 13.1 million tonnes. Dumping this material as waste would cause severe problems for all cities and countries where animal slaughter and meat processing take place, exacerbating an already serious municipal solid waste situation.
According to the World Bank, the mass of municipal solid waste reached a global level of more than 2 billion tonnes in 2016. It warns that, without urgent action, this will increase to 3.4 billion tonnes per year by 2050. In the developing world, the problem is even more acute because 90% of waste in these countries is “mismanaged”.
In parallel, the meat industry needs to consider how much money it will have to spend if it manages hides and skins in the same way as other solid waste. The UK, for example, imposes a landfill tax that reached a rate of £94.15 per tonne of waste from April 2020. Putting all of the meat sector’s hides and skins into landfill as waste would cost meat companies more than £1.25 billion (about $1.7 billion) per year at these rates. This cost would, in all likelihood, be passed on to consumers, making meat more expensive and less accessible.
The tanning industry has also shown that processing the hides and skins to make leather generates far fewer greenhouse gas emissions than letting the material go to waste.
This essay argues that the leather industry does the meat industry and society at large a great service by taking unwanted material and converting it into leather for shoes, accessories, clothing and upholstery. Tanners and finished leather product brands should remind customers of this in the face of questions about sustainability.
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