LCA Life Cycle Assessment
For a complete assessment of the environmental impacts associated with the creation of a product, the international scientific community has long developed a methodology called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This ’studies the environmental aspects and potential impacts along the entire life cycle of a product (from the cradle to the grave): from the acquisition of the raw material through production, its use and its subsequent disposal’ (ISO 14040, 2006).
Since LCA calculations must, by definition, be implemented on all processes that contribute to the creation of the product, one of the most important factors on which an agreement must be reached at an international level is the definition of what are known as ’System Boundaries,’ which define the process that must be considered as the initial phase of the product itself (the cradle) and the one that determines its end (the grave). The tanning process includes various chemical and mechanical processes which have the aim of transforming organic matter that can rot (raw hides) into products with high added value, strategic for sectors such as footwear, fashion, furniture and transport.
This data is crucial for defining the system boundaries. The main issue for which the sector has carried out in-depth technical and scientific studies is the inclusion/exclusion of processes upstream of the tannery, with specific reference to agriculture and animal breeding, which in some cases can represent up to 80% of the carbon footprint and up to 99% of the water footprint.
For a careful analysis of the leather product system boundaries based on the current LCA calculation rules, the first consideration to be made refers to the nature of the raw hides. For the purposes of the calculations, it is important to determine whether the raw hides are to be considered a waste from the upstream (meat) industry or its co-product/by-product. If raw hides were considered waste from the upstream industry, the entire environmental impact would in fact have to be allocated to the main product of the value chain developed up to that point, with the exclusion of agriculture and livestock from the system boundaries in LCA studies on leather.
International legislation mainly considers raw hides as by-products of the food industry. A clear example of this is European legislation (Reg. 1069/2009, Reg. 142/2011 on animal by-products). From this perspective, it becomes essential to further analyse the nature of the different processes that led to the generation of the by-product. In particular, the scientific literature on LCA, available at an international level, addresses the case of co-products (by-products) of renewable origin, defining it as a highly complex technical problem which, however, is easily understandable by answering two questions:
Are raw hides by-products of renewable origin?
and
Does leather replace, at least in part, other products?
To answer the first question, a generic co-production process must first be analysed. In every process that generates one or more co-products (by-products), there is in fact a product defined as determining. The determining product is the one which precisely determines the production volume of the process itself. If it were not for the production of that product, the process would not start. There can be only one determining product at a specific time. In the specific case of the tanning supply chain, over 99% of the raw material used (raw hides) has bovine, sheep and goat origin, the availability of which is linked to the consumption of meat and, consequently, to the dynamics of animal slaughter. It can therefore be stated that the determining product is not the leather, but the meat.
Given the definition of renewable resource as ’a natural resource with the ability to reproduce through biological or natural processes and reproduced with the passage of time,’ it can be stated that raw hides are almost entirely by-products of renewable origin.
Answering the second question, given the composition of the materials made using finished leather, it is easy to state that the leather itself provides the main alternative to other materials (mostly synthetic) in the creation of objects (footwear, leather goods, clothing, car interiors, upholstery).
In conclusion, it could therefore be stated that in the case of leather made with raw materials coming from animals raised for other human consumption (dairy production, wool, meat), the system boundary is the slaughterhouse, where activities and treatments are carried out in order to prepare the hides to be used for tanning (for example: the preservation of hides by means of cooling or salting systems), to end at the tannery gates. In other words, if animals are raised for meat, milk or wool and not for their raw hides, the environmental impacts associated with agriculture and livestock farming should be attributed only to those products (and not to the leather).
Unfortunately, this has not been the approach used in some important LCA projects that have been conducted internationally in recent years in some specific areas of assessment, standardisation and certification (PEF, EPD, ISO), where it was decided that, despite its nature as a by-product, the LCA of leather, given that it still has an economic value, should also include part of the impact generated in the animal breeding phases.
PEF (Product Environmental Footprint)
In 2013 the European tanning industry, including the Italian one, participated in the pilot phase of the European Commission’s Single Market for Green Products initiative for the definition of a single method for assessing the environmental impact of products marketed in the member states, the PEF (Product Environmental Footprint). The supply chains that have joined the initiative have the task of developing specific rules for their industrial sector, the PEFCR (Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules).
The PEF is a company (self) diagnosis tool, which provides a criterion for identifying the environmental impacts of processes and products, with the general objective of reducing them, taking into account the activities of the supply chain (origin of raw materials, production, use and final waste management).
The analysis must be conducted for 16 environmental impact categories, using the calculation method considered most reliable for each, and allows companies to delve deeper into the origin of environmental impacts and plan possible improvement actions. However, these actions can only concern the phases over which the tannery has or can have direct control and not the impacts deriving from agriculture and livestock farming.
The evaluation of the PEF requires, as mentioned previously, an analysis of the entire product chain for which, in addition to the processes over which the tannery has or can have direct control, all the upstream phases must be considered, starting from animal husbandry. A portion of their impact must therefore be allocated to the various resulting products, following pre-established rules based on different criteria.
For the reasons described above (by-product of animal origin and impossibility of influencing the upstream phases, agriculture and breeding), in the context of the discussion on the boundaries of the PEF, the tanning sector has instead supported ’zero allocation’ for raw hides.
However, the European Commission has established that all products with an economic value cannot be treated as waste, thus definitively rejecting the ’zero allocation’ proposal and forcing the sector to bear a portion of the environmental impact of the phases upstream which, although negligible in terms of percentage (on the total impact of animal breeding), appears to have an enormous weight for some categories of environmental impact.
The calculation of the environmental footprint is strongly influenced by the availability of primary data, and alternatively, by the quality and specificity of the data present in commercial databases specialised in environmental analyses. Especially for the upstream phases of the tannery (livestock farming and agriculture), these latter factors introduce considerable approximations, leading to extremely and unjustifiably heavy default impacts.
In 2023, UNIC decided to continue participating in the PEF initiative, joining the project to review it. But the persistent lack of availability on the part of the European Commission to review, on the basis of more real and current data, the allocation percentages related to the upstream phases and the impossibility of using primary data (in a context in which the default data of the databases are not reliable) led us, in the spring of 2024, to the bitter decision to abandon the project and for the moment, no longer support the initiative. In fact, we believe that it is not able to give a real and correct picture of the impact of leather production.
UNIC is currently working on other alternative schemes capable of analysing and reflecting the life cycle of our product in a more faithful and objective manner, always based on the collaboration of all the subjects involved in the value chain, through the sharing of data, with important mutual benefits in terms of reliability, reproducibility and comparability of results.