The Leather Industry Grapples with Deforestation

By Marissa Brock

Leather remains one of the fashion industry’s more lucrative commodities – and its biggest problem.

 In 2019, a surge of rainforest fires raised questions of whether brands and retailers that purchased Brazilian leather were inadvertently contributing to the environmental degradation of the rainforest. By August, satellite imagery captured evidence that around 76,000 fires were burning across the Brazilian Amazon, up 80% from the previous year. June to December is the dry season in the southern Amazon basin, and ecologists attributed the burning to human activity. On its own, the Amazon rarely burns, and its ecosystem has not adapted to deal with frequent fires.

It wasn’t always like this. Efforts by the Brazilian government in the mid 2000’s to better monitor the management of the rainforest and agricultural land led the annual deforestation rate reached to reach new lows in 2012, 80% lower than the average between 1995 – 2006.

Things changed in 2018. The election of a new president – one who pledged to increase agricultural activity in the Amazon – has led to worry in the environmental community and amongst indigenous leaders in the region. By early summer of 2019, the INPE alerted that Amazon deforestation was up 25% more than the year before, with over 700 square miles of forest destroyed in April, May, and June of that year.

A reckoning in the fashion industry

The troubling reports coming out of Brazil in the summer of 2019 led many in the fashion industry to look more critically into their leather supply chains. The reality, though, is that this problem has been evident for over a decade. Brazilian beef companies were supplying leather to global fashion brands and retailers, and as the demand increased, ranchers steadily increased their commonplace “slash and burn” method of clearing forests for their cattle to graze. The leather supply chain was somewhat murky, and difficult to track. As a result, several major fashion brands such as H&M and VF Corporation, which owns The North Face and Timberland, ended up banning all leather from Brazil outright.

What now?

So…where do we go from here? The demand for leather continues to be high, and many fashion and leather-goods companies continue to have major gaps in their supply chains. The only solution is for companies to better utilize data to map out the potential environmental impacts of their existing supply chains and using that information to make more responsible decisions.  

In a December 2020 interview with Sourcing Journal, Sourcemap founder and CEO Leonardo Bonanni provides the following insight: “Certifications gave us the standards for sustainable leather, but they can’t monitor what happens at every step of a company’s leather supply chain…What makes leather difficult to trace is that cows—unlike cotton or viscose—move around a lot before they’re processed into leather. And companies that buy leather are not accustomed to tracking every step in the life of the cows they buy.”

How Sourcemap can help

Building on existing frameworks, Sourcemap’s Responsible Leather Platform is a cloud-based tool that maps hides and skins across the apparel, footwear and automotive supply chains to ensure that the leather is sourced without contributing to deforestation. “What the Responsible Leather Platform offers is a data-driven approach to mapping and monitoring every facility in a leather supply chain, from ranches to slaughterhouses and tanneries and beyond, so that any data that could indicate a heightened risk of non-compliance is quickly and clearly flagged and the appropriate follow-up actions are taken in real time,” Bonanni said. While fashion brand are looking for ways to source leather in less problematic ways, the “real leaders, according to Bonnani, are doing it because they believe in a sustainable supply chain. To read more from Sourcemap’s interview in the December edition of Sourcing Journal, click here.

Is leather a commodity in your supply chain? To learn more about how Sourcemap can help you trace and map a more sustainable supply chain, request a demo from our experts.