»Eco leather« - a paradox

Unfortunately, ecology and environmental sustainability are quite often abused as marketing instruments. As a result, terms such as «eco leather» and «bio leather» are used in leather marketing, although no definitions as such exist. Nor have the International Council of Tanners ICT or the Union of International Tanning Chemists Associations IULTCS yet established criteria for defining the term «eco leather». For this, a comprehensive analysis of environmentally relevant criteria is necessary. Furthermore, in order to consider serious sustainable production of a green leather article which rightly deserves the suffix “eco”, the entire manufacturing chain must be evaluated starting from the farm and the production of chemicals up to the end of the working life-span of a leather article. This process is called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Such LCA studies reveal interesting results: at first glance, everyone would for example tend to believe that vegetable tanned leather would be the first to deserve the prefix “eco”. However, the fact that the production of a vegetable tanned material requires double the amount of water and energy compared to chrome tannage puts things in a different light. One might therefore imagine that the LCA of a vegetable tanned leather article is different and has no ecological advantage compared to a standard chrome leather. However, even though vegetable tanned leather might be preferable, it will never be possible to completely replace chrome tanning, as there are not enough sustainable vegetable tanning agents available world-wide.