4 days ago
Is Luxury Fashion Doing Enough to Source Deforestation-Free Leather?
Accessible luxury brand Coach is buying leather from suppliers linked to illegal cattle ranches in the most deforested parts of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, where United Nations climate talks are scheduled to take place in November, according to an investigation published Monday by Earthsight.
The environmental nonprofit said it analyzed court rulings, satellite imagery, shipment records and went undercover to tie the Tapestry-owned firm to Frigol, a Brazilian meatpacking giant that it says has an 'egregious record' of cattle purchases connected with environmental and Indigenous rights abuses.
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Frigol said that its procurement policy is in line with monitoring protocols for sourcing cattle developed by Imaflora, a forest and agricultural nonprofit, and Brazil's public prosecutor's office.
While land clearance for cattle ranching is the biggest driver of deforestation across the South American nation, Earthsight said, the worst-affected state is that of Pará, where 18.6 million hectares, an area nearly double the size of Portugal, has been torched over the past 20 years, often without legal authorization. The Brazilian government, which has pledged to eliminate deforestation by 2030, picked the Pará capital of Belém as the site for what is colloquially known as COP30, the first of its kind to be held in a rainforest.
Because of the hot-button nature of sourcing Brazilian leather, several brands have banned the commodity altogether. Among them is Timberland owner VF Corp., which made the decision following the country's slow response in battling unprecedented wildfires that destroyed thousands of square miles of rainforest in 2019. Both H&M and Nike also have policies against sourcing leather from the Amazon biome.
While Coach hasn't nixed Brazil from its sourcing map, its parent company is a founding signatory of Textile Exchange and the Leather Working Group's 2022 Deforestation-Free Call to Action for Leather, which 'challenges' brands to commit to sourcing their leather from verified deforestation-free supply chains by 2030—if not earlier. Tapestry said at the time that it was working toward achieving 95 percent traceability and mapping of its raw materials by 2025, including by endowing the World Wildlife Fund with a $3 million grant to improve the traceability of Brazil's leather value chain.
Roughly 80 percent of Brazilian leather is exported overseas. Pará's top exporter of leather to Europe is Durlicouros, a tannery that obtains its hides from Frigo. Earthsight said that nearly a quarter of Durlicouros's leather exports from Pará to Italy are purchased by Conceria Cristina and Faeda, two tanneries in the Veneto region that supply to prominent names in the automotive, interior design and fashion sectors. Investigators posing as interested buyers were told by Conceria Cristina that they supply leather to Coach. A Conceria Cristina representative told Earthsight that Coach regularly uses hides from Brazil.
Paolo Zeggio, head of sustainability at Faeda, pushed back at the allegations, characterizing Durlicouros as a 'minor' supplier that provides fewer than 0.1 percent of its hides. Faeda doesn't use Brazilian leather for luxury brands due to the 'poor quality' of the raw material, he said. Zeggio also described leather as a 'scrap of the food industry' that isn't fueling deforestation. Durlicouros told Earthsight that its operations comply with Brazilian laws and responsible sourcing practices. Conceria Cristina did not respond to a request for comment.
While Earthsight said it cannot be completely sure that the leather in Coach's products originates from cattle reared illegally in the Amazon, its use of Brazilian leather and two suppliers with value chains 'exposed to these harms' risks making its customers 'complicit' in deforestation and Indigenous rights violations. It said that Coach should be 'embarrassed' by the results of its probe, particularly in light of the Coachtopia purveyor's refocused marketing on 'unusually selective and environmentally conscious' Gen Z customers who were born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s.
'Tapestry's values dictate that we stay true to [the] principles and practices of responsible sourcing across our full value chain, including the small proportion of leather sourced from Brazil—less than 10 percent of total leather used in our products,' a spokesperson said in a statement. 'We recognize that the system for tracking raw materials in Brazil is complex and imperfect; however, Tapestry is working to be part of the solution to improve traceability and transparency through our programs with WWF and other organizations.'
Experts agree that tracing a hide's provenance is trickier than it might appear at first blush. Though many brands, including Coach, rely on certifications as a means to 'sustainably source' leather, nearly all of them offer visibility only at the tannery level. Everything else upstream falls under the meat industry, a wholly disparate value chain that is essentially walled off from the fashion sector.
'One of the key criticisms we would have of Leather Working Group is that it doesn't extend to the ranches,' said Lara Shirra White, a campaigner for Latin America at Earthsight.
This is something the organization has been grappling with, said Debbie Burton, the Leather Working Group's director of communications. Despite recognizing the importance of transparency within the leather supply chain, along with the need to address complex issues such as deforestation and land-use change, the organization is also 'clear and transparent' about the remit of its certification.
'Our standards framework is designed to assess environmental compliance and performance within leather manufacturing facilities, and while it includes requirements around traceability and sourcing, it does not currently require full traceability to the farm level,' she said. 'To that end, we have been actively working with a dedicated and diverse group of stakeholders, including international NGOs, industry experts and brands who share our commitment to finding practical and effective ways to measure and report on the challenges resulting from leather being a byproduct in a complex supply-chain that starts with the food industry.'
Partnering with Textile Exchange aside, the Leather Working Group has partnered with the National Wildlife Federation, World Wildlife Fund and the Gibbs Land Use and Environment Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to map the impacts of leather production on deforestation.
The Brazilian leather industry, through the Centre for the Brazilian Tanning Industry, told Sourcing Journal that it is opposed to illegal deforestation and 'acts proactively to promote better environmental, social and economic practices.'
'Brazilian leather is produced in accordance with national legislation, with continuous investments in improving monitoring and control systems, including those concerning indirect suppliers,' a spokesperson said. 'In Brazil, traceability is treated as a priority by both governments and lawmakers. In the state of Pará, for example, the local government implements the sustainable livestock program of Pará, which includes the official individual bovine traceability system, aimed at individually identifying all cattle and buffaloes all across the state by 2026.'
Even so, one challenge is that the leather sector has limited leverage in the beef supply chain because the value of hides represents just 1 percent of slaughterhouse revenue, said Fernando Bellese, senior director of beef and leather supply chains at the World Wildlife Fund.
He also said that disinvesting from problematic regions like Brazil doesn't help address the problem but could rather exacerbate it. It is only by working collectively that companies in this sector have the chance to be 'part of the solution,' Bellese added.
'It is important that companies buying from high-risk areas commit to implementing deforestation-free supply chains, and go beyond, by working together to scale the solutions needed,' he said.
Earthsight's report doesn't only implicate Coach in terms of potential exposure. It says that Fendi, Chloé and Hugo Boss all purchase leather from both Faeda and Conceria Cristina. Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Kering's Balenciaga and Gucci, it added, are among Faeda's clients, while Saint Laurent, also owned by Kering, is supplied by Conceria Cristina.
Though Chanel, Kering and Fendi didn't respond to requests for comment, they told Earthsight that the hides they bought from the tanneries didn't hail from Brazil. Chanel also said that it ended its partnership with Faeda at the start of 2024 because the tannery no longer met its traceability requirements. (Zeggio from Faeda said that Chanel raised no such concerns.)
A spokesperson from Hugo Boss said that a detailed review confirmed that none of the leather it has received from it tanneries is connected with Durlicuoros. As part of its traceability efforts, the company will also require all direct Tier 2 leather suppliers to provide farm-level data in line with the European Union Deforestation Regulation, or EUDR, which will take effect by the end of 2025.
But Earthsight says that brands are currently unprepared for the EUDR. That is, unless the leather lobby—which, like Zeggio from Faeda, claims no direct link between leather and deforestation—is successful in excluding the material. Despite the opacity and complexity of Brazil's cattle supply chains 'being known for years,' it said, 'corporations and certification schemes have preferred to paper over these current problems rather than address them.' Chloé was the only company that detailed methods that could allow it to adequately verify claims from Conceria Cristina and Faeda, Earthsight added.
White disagreed with portrayals of leather as a byproduct and 'faultless commodity' that saves materials that would otherwise go into the landfill. It's also a 'key economic driver' for the expansion of cattle ranching into high-risk deforestation regions like Brazil, she said. If the biggest brands can't get it right, White said, then what chance do other, lower-cachet ones have of doing so?
'All brands have a responsibility to provide guaranteed supply chain due diligence,' she said. 'The thing about luxury brands is that they put themselves as a kind of gold standard of sustainability. And I think that consumers, when they spend the amount of money that they do on these products, assume that it would come with a safety net against buying products that can be traced back to deforestation or human rights abuses. I think that this case, as well as other cases that have come out against luxury brands in the past year, demonstrate that these names don't protect consumers against illegalities.'
