A decision to use leather made from traceable hides has allowed Icebug to cut in half the  carbon emissions it attributes to the leather in its products.

Swedish footwear brand Icebug has achieved a substantial reduction in the carbon emissions it calculates for the nubuck leather it uses in products in its autumn-winter 2023-2024 collection. Its work with hide supplier Spoor and with tanning partner Ecco Leather has allowed it to cut those carbon emissions in half.

A specialist in creating shoes and boots for walking, hiking, running, especially in wintery conditions, Icebug insists it has had sustainability and eco-consciousness at the heart of its strategy since its launch in 2001. In 2018, it signed up for a United Nations initiative called Climate Neutral Now. This commitment involved three steps: embracing the need to measure greenhouse gas emissions, reducing those emissions as much as possible and, lastly, participating in carbon offsetting to compensate for emissions that it could not avoid. This encouraged the footwear company to speed up initiatives it already had in place to improve environmental performance. By February 2019, it was able to announce that it had become not just climate-neutral, but climate-positive.

Appetite for innovation

It has continued to look for further improvements, including in its material choices and it was this quest that brought Icebug into partnership with Ecco Leather and Spoor. Ecco Leather had already been its supplier of nubuck for footwear uppers for years and Icebug was a vocal supporter of innovations that the leather manufacturer brought into its production set-up, including DriTan.

Last year, the chief executive of the Ecco group, and former chief executive of its leather division, Panos Mytaros, told our sister title World Leather that he feared the company’s DriTan innovation had received less attention than it deserved. Ecco Leather launched this new tanning technology in 2018, saying it would allow it to save 250 million litres of water per year at its tannery in the Netherlands. DriTan makes this possible by using all of the available moisture already present in hides to lower water consumption.

If the reaction to this advancement in some quarters has disappointed Mr Mytaros, he can level no complaint at Icebug; the Swedish footwear brand took the DriTan message on board from the start and has shared it enthusiastically with consumers. This message now includes a claim from a lifecycle assessment (LCA) exercise that Ecco Leather has carried out that DriTan leather’s CO2 emissions are 34% lower than those of chrome-tanned leather.

Traceable hides

Icebug has now taken this further, reaching more deeply into the supply chain, by announcing that, from its autumn-winter 2023-2024 collection onwards, the nubuck that Ecco Tan produces for its footwear will be processed not only using breakthrough technology such as DriTan, but from traceable hides. These will be supplied by Spoor. 

Based in Denmark, Spoor’s specialism is supplying semi-processed, totally traceable hides. Spoor launched in September 2020, using a laser-technology based system for marking and identifying hides. This has allowed its partners in the finished leather manufacturer community, including Ecco Leather, and finished product brand customers, now including Icebug, to pinpoint exactly where the leather in a specific item comes from. Footwear brand Roccamore, also from Denmark, is among the companies that quickly picked up on the benefits of using the material that Spoor markets as Nordic Traceable Leather.

Markings remain

Semi-finished leather producer Scan-Hide is the organisation behind Spoor. It is some four years now since Scan-Hide chief executive, Michael Sondergaard, spoke at a workshop on traceability at the Lineapelle exhibition in Milan and said its work on developing a laser technology-based system for marking and identifying hides was almost complete. Spoor has proved that the system works; the laser markings on semi-finished leather leaving Denmark remain intact throughout the retanning and finishing processes. With careful data collection and record-keeping of what happens when the finished leather moves to customers’ manufacturing facilities for cutting and for use in products, brands can connect the upstream supply chain data to the boots, shoes, bags and sofas they want to bring to market. 

On the day of his presentation of the idea at Lineapelle, Michael Sondergaard said that he was convinced consumers, especially younger consumers, wanted to know more about the products they buy. He said Scan-Hide’s traceability system would “add to the story”. Since August last year, Spoor has been adding even more to the story by making detailed information about the carbon footprint of the leather it supplies available to customers.

Back to a single animal

Just as Spoor is part of Scan-Hide, in turn Scan-Hide is 98% owned by Danish Crown, a supplier of beef and pork to many markets around the world under the control of around 5,600 farmers. Danish Crown says sustainability is “the foundation of our new business strategy”, which has the end objective of offering customers sustainably produced, high-quality meat. It has said it wants to be a leader when it comes to transparency and that, to this end, it is continuously working to strengthen its collection and analysis of data.

“Through our unique set-up at farm level, we retrieve specific data points that help us in our work on sustainability each day, at the farms, in production, as people and employees, and in the final product on the consumer’s plate,” the meat production group says. Its efforts have allowed it to compile LCA data for each farm, taking into account scope-one (direct greenhouse gas emissions), scope-two (emissions from the energy required to run the farm’s operations) and scope-three (indirect emissions that occur in the value chain).

Because Spoor also has access to this group information, it has now been able to work out the carbon footprint of its leather and make the details available for brands to use in their own product footprint calculations and customer communications. “We hold primary data,” business development director, Birgitte Langer, explains. “We have access to the climate data the farmers collect and the system Scan-Hide developed for Spoor means we have traceability back not just to the farm but to a single animal. Thanks to this, we know what the emissions are for each hide.” 

Before and after 

Icebug is one of the first finished product brands to take this new information and weave it into its narrative for consumers. It had calculated carbon emissions for the leather it used before this, but the footwear company’s sustainability manager, Maria Munther, explains that it had to do so without any specific data from suppliers. Instead, it had to use available global average values from the Higg Materials Sustainability Index (MSI). Supplier-specific data makes the calculations much better, she says. As a result, Icebug can now compare before-and-after figures for the carbon footprint of the leather in its footwear. Its calculation for the leather it was using before was an average of 36.4 kilos of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per kilo of finished leather. The leather it is using in its new autumn-winter collection, the Nordic Traceable Leather made from hides from Spoor, gives an average figure of 17.9 kilos of CO2e. This means the decision to use traceable hides from Spoor has allowed Icebug to halve the carbon emissions it attributes to the leather in its products.

These figures are third-party verified (by an independent environmental consultancy in Denmark) and are compliant with the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology that the European Commission has proposed as a way of measuring environmental performance. Customers will be able to use the figures in their own LCA calculations. Spoor is also working with Worldly, the new name for the platform that hosts the Higg Index, to have the figures for Nordic Traceable Leather added to its database. 

For Ms Langer, all of this points to important, real-world progress; it gives a starting point for calculating the carbon emissions attributable to Nordic Traceable Leather and the figures will, she insists, continue to come down because the Danish Crown farmers are working all the time to lower emissions further. Across Denmark, intense research is going on in laboratories and pilot exercises are taking place on farms, all with the aim of bringing down the carbon footprint of the entire Danish agricultural sector. This “responsible, ambitious farming” offers benefits to the leather industry in the shape of the lower carbon footprint figures Spoor and customers such as Icebug are now able to shout about, Ms Langer concludes.

On solid ground. Icebug is one of the first finished product brands to incorporate new, detailed LCA data from Spoor into its messages to consumers. Its calculation for carbon emissions of the leather it uses has now reduced by half.
CREDIT: ICEBUG

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