COTANCE has confirmed that the new tool it is preparing to introduce for leather manufacturers to measure carbon footprint could bring benefits not just to the industry in Europe but to the global leather industry. Report by Leatherbiz.

The industry’s representative body in the European Union announced on January 10 that it would unveil the new tool in Frankfurt on January 25. The setting will be a second workshop for a project it is running with trade union organisation industriAll Europe, which COTANCE refers to as its social partner.

They launched the project, Green Deal Leather, in Milan in September and said its main areas of focus would include workplace safety and ideas for helping the leather industry make progress towards being zero-impact.

It is this second point that will feature prominently at the second workshop in Frankfurt. COTANCE has confirmed to World Leather that it has made a positive assessment of work that German industry body VDL began in 2012 for capturing carbon footprint data as part of its ECO2L programme.

“This is a positive development,” COTANCE said. “The new ECO2L tool remains a VDL instrument, which means it is an instrument developed from scratch by the leather industry. At a European level, we are creating the basis for upgrading ECO2L with the aim of making it into an official tool for the global leather industry.”