Puma chairman calls for government action on materials tariffs
10/10/2012
Jochen Zeitz said the results of a new product profit and loss analysis, which compares a new biodegradable shoe (made from materials including organic cotton and linen) and a traditional suede Puma athletic shoe, “dramatically demonstrate that we have to steadily increase the share of sustainable materials in our collections so that we mitigate not only Puma’s but also our consumers’ environmental footprint”. The cotton and linen shoes are part of a new collection, InCycle, which Puma is about to launch.
The implication of this is that Puma does not regard leather as a sustainable material, which flies in the face of millennia of human experience, scientific research and also of the sustainability strategy of Puma’s parent group, PPR. PPR’s luxury leathergoods and footwear brands include Bottega Veneta, Gucci, Balenciaga, Puma, Yves Saint Laurent and Sergio Rossi. It also owns sportswear company Volcom.
At the end of April, PPR issued a set of core sustainability targets for its luxury and sports-lifestyle brands to achieve by 2016, with two of them referring directly to leather. It said 100% of leather from domestic livestock (that is, non-exotic leather) in PPR products will be from “responsible and verified sources that do not result in converting sensitive ecosystems into grazing lands or agricultural lands for food production for livestock”.
At the same time, it said all exotic skins, which PPR will continue to use, would come from verified captive breeding operations or from wild, sustainably managed populations.
Suppliers of leather to PPR brands will employ “accepted animal welfare practices and humane treatment in sourcing”, it added. The group said it would monitor performance, making monitoring of its suppliers of leather and other raw materials a priority.
PPR’s support of leather remains strong and its sustainability programme also includes a commitment to making all its collections free from polyvinyl chloride, often used as a synthetic substitute to leather, by 2016. It said it wanted the different brands in the group to customise their own action plans and to identify priority issues so that they can achieve the 2016 group targets.
Judging by comments Jochen Zeitz has made since the release of this document, which he helped to draw up, Puma’s action plan appears to include eliminating leather as much as possible and using more and more synthetic as well as natural substitutes.
At the end of June, he told the Financial Times: “We should eat less meat, all of us, and we should use less leather. We all know that cattle and beef are among the biggest contributors to carbon emissions. We have to find alternative ways of producing our raw materials without asking nature to do it for us.”
In his new comments, he calls upon governments to “start supporting companies to use more sustainable materials in their products instead of continuing with antiquated incentives, such as import duties on synthetic materials that are in principle much higher compared with those placed on leathergoods regardless of the environmental footprint”.
The study looked at a number of factors, including greenhouse gas emissions, waste and air pollution and the use of natural resources. It said the production, usage and disposal of the InCycle Basket shoes cause around 35% less environmental costs of greenhouse gas emissions than the conventional suede shoe, but did not explain fully how it had reached this figure.
There is an ongoing discussion in the leather industry concerning how much of a share of cattle’s carbon footprint tanners should assume and include in their calculations of the lifecycle analysis of leather. Some influential figures in the industry believe the figure should be zero because the hide is a by-product that would go to waste if tanners did not recycle it into the valued and flexible material that is leather. Others, notably tanning group PrimeAsia, have come up with a figure for the purposes of calculating leather’s share of the upstream carbon footprint, reaching the conclusion that if the value of a hide is 7% of the value of a cow, 7% is a fair figure to use.
Puma has not said specifically how it has calculated the figures in its new analysis, but says in its explanation of the methodology it has used: “For leather, an adjustment must be made to account for the fact that leather is only one of the economic outputs of cattle production, the principal other output being meat. Some commentators argue that leather is a pure by-product of cattle rearing for meat. Puma takes the more conservative view that since the value of the hide adds up to 15% to the value of the meat, demand for leather forms part of the economic case for cattle-rearing.” It doesn’t say specifically that it has applied the figure 15% to its calculations.
Even allowing for its “more conservative” approach to leather’s contributions, which appears to us to place more of the burden for upstream carbon footprint on the tanning sector, the suede shoes still score better in Puma’s analysis on air pollution. The InCycle Basket shoe causes 14% more air pollution than the traditional suede shoe. And it’s 12% more expensive for consumers to buy.
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