The European Parliament and the European Commission have listened and have removed leather from the scope of EUDR. Some campaign groups have taken the news badly.

The global leather industry has scored a significant success at the European Commission. After years of campaigning, with cogent arguments based on science and common sense, senior industry figures have secured the removal of leather from the scope of the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). As planned, the regulation will still come into force at the end of December this year for bigger companies and in June next year for smaller ones. But now leather manufacturers will no longer be among the companies that have to capture and share data from their upstream supply chains to show they have no link to deforestation. The European Commission has accepted that leather is not a driver of deforestation.

This journey towards realisation was tortuous. Formal adoption of EUDR by the European Parliament and by leaders of the 27 EU member states came in June 2023. Originally, it was to come into application on December 30, 2024. This was postponed until December 30, 2025. Then it was postponed again until December 30, 2026.

Against waste

EUDR focuses on seven commodities: palm oil, cattle, soy, coffee, cocoa, timber and rubber. The European Commission has consistently referred to these as the commodities “most associated with deforestation or forest degradation”. It immediately included “certain products made from these commodities” in EUDR’s scope too. Some by-products quickly secured an exemption, often on the basis that they were products or materials that would go to waste if manufacturers did not make use of them. Initial attempts to secure an exemption for hides, skins and leather, which can also lay claim to this criterion, were unsuccessful.

Now, though, the European Commission has published a new draft of a ‘delegated act’ amending EUDR legislation. The new draft is part of a formal review of EUDR that it promised to carry out before the end of April 2026. It removes leather from the scope of the regulation.

Recovery from a low blow

A ‘delegated act’ allows the Commission to update EUDR legislation without going through the full legislative process again. The Commission says the new draft reflects stakeholder feedback. It was feedback that took years to filter through. In the build-up to EUDR’s initial adoption, at a vote at the European Parliament’s plenary session in Strasbourg in September 2022, more than 275 of the elected members voted in favour of an exemption for leather. But nearly 340 voted against. At the time, leather’s representative body in the EU, COTANCE, described this as a low blow.

After the Commission’s 2026 change of heart, COTANCE’s response was to say: “This is more than just a regulatory adjustment. It is the formal recognition of a position COTANCE has held and defended, with evidence, since EUDR’s inception.” Its position is that hides, skins and leather are “merely by-products” of the meat and dairy industries. They do not drive cattle farming. They do not drive deforestation and exclusion now of hides and leather is the correct thing for the Commission to do. 

At the core of the industry’s argument is a research paper, ‘Socio-economic and environmental analysis of the effects of Regulation 2023/1115/EU on the European leather sector’, that a team of six academics at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa compiled. They found no direct link in academic literature between leather and deforestation. Instead, they found that including leather in the scope of EUDR would have had a severe economic impact on the European cattle and hide supply chain, leaving tanners without the raw materials they need, forcing some businesses to close and people working across the supply chain to lose their jobs. The study also warned of the detrimental environmental effect of the increased use of alternative materials and of hides going to waste if a “short-circuiting of the European leather industry” came to pass.

Claims and clamour

The new draft was also open for stakeholder feedback, with the public having until June 1 to share their responses. The European Commission received comments from more than 4,000 people and organisations. More than 1,300 of these comments refer directly to the removal of leather from the scope of EUDR. Many of the comments are in favour of this development, but most of those that make a direct reference to leather are against this change. The feedback makes for unpleasant reading on the whole but none of the submissions raises any argument that we have not heard a hundred times before.

Frankly, we might have expected better from some of the campaign groups that responded. For example, the European policy programme at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says: “The proposed exclusion of leather and hides is particularly concerning. Leather has one of the highest deforestation footprints among products covered by EUDR.” Greenpeace weighs in with this: “Leather circulating in the EU has also a significant negative impact on the livelihood of indigenous peoples and local communities in the areas of production.” Neither Brussels-based lobby group offers any evidence for these claims.

The point we make in quoting them is that, even though leather looks to have won this battle, the fight against anti-leather propaganda is far from over. Campaign groups like WWF and Greenpeace have been making comments like these for decades and seem not to feel the need to justify them. They have thousands of supporters who believe and repeat every word they say. You can see this in the feedback.

Worth the hard work

All the leather industry can do in the face of this is to keep improving in terms of sustainability and circularity, keep amassing facts to support its arguments and keep working out the best way to tell those stories.

There are people who will refuse to listen; they have already made their minds up. “Behind every piece of leather there are destroyed forests, exploited animals, and rivers polluted by tanneries,” claims one concerned citizen of France. At least on this occasion members of the European Parliament and officials at the European Commission did listen in the end, which means all the hard work involved in making a clear, fact-based case for leather can be worth it.

It took years, but arguments for exempting leather from the scope of the European Union Deforestation Regulation have hit home. Credit: European Union

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