If skins and hides aren’t transformed into leather, they end up in landfills, left to rot naturally—so what’s the problem?

Many people are not aware that rotting animal-derived material produces GHG. Also, redundant hides left to rot in landfills produce these emissions. Globally, up to 40% of all cattle hides—amounting to 134 million hides annually—go to waste.

In the leather industry we know that this is a sad wastage of natural, renewable resources with an important environmental impact. However, the latest analysis of the Leather and Hide Council of America (LHCA) shows that the impact was much greater than previously thought.

We were underestimating this figure by a factor of 8!

Using the ReFED impact calculator, LHCA found that one tonne of hides in a landfill generates over 13 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. Globally, discarded hides contribute thus to more than 40 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions every year: https://lnkd.in/eNhPbeJX

To put that into perspective:

• Equivalent to the yearly emissions of 8.7 million cars
• Matches the CO₂ absorbed by 660 million trees over 10 years
• Comparable to powering 5 million homes for a year

But the story doesn’t end there:

By transforming all the World’s 334 million hides produced annually and storing durably CO₂ in leather, we could avoid some 100 million tonnes of CO₂e per annum, generating just 13.3* million tonnes of CO₂e emissions (*using the Eco2L/GreenDeal average value for the cattle leather).

Moreover, all these leather grains & splits produced could replace up to 3 billion m² of fossil-fuel-based fashion materials, which, btw, also contribute to climate change.

Transforming hides into leather is part of the solution in the fight against climate change.