There is an intriguing touch of irony in the unhurried approach that leather chemicals group Silvateam is adopting in its work on lifecycle analysis (LCA). Director of the group’s leather business unit, Antonio Battaglia, says it is only really in the last year or so that some urgency has come into the leather industry’s LCA conversation. A pick-up in the pace led specialist consultancy Spin 360 to host a dedicated workshop on the subject at the September 2022 edition of Lineapelle. Earlier that month, the same topic came up during a number of conversations at the Sustainable Leather Forum in Paris. During one of these, Antonio Battaglia’s fellow Silvateam director (and brother) Michele made it clear that LCA is a continuous improvement process. He says it is important for all of the actors in the industry to start measuring impact so that they can all improve the accuracy of their numbers and take actions to reduce their carbon footprint. At present, he insists, only primary data can be taken as trustworthy. Data from non-primary sources must be used with caution. There can be major errors inside those numbers, he warns, and at the moment any decisions companies take based on LCA assessments that use non-primary data could even, potentially, increase their carbon emissions.

Antonio Battaglia confirms that the group is taking a long-term, 360-degree view. His brother’s specific focus is on a different (although connected) project for the company’s animal nutrition business unit, a project to examine the effect on upstream carbon emissions of using quebracho and chestnut extracts in cattle feed. The connection with the leather business unit is that companies with a high level of control over the whole supply chain (animal, hide, leather, leather products) will be able to use the data that emerges from this project to produce a low-emission or even carbon-positive leather in the near future. He sums this up by saying that giving cattle carefully produced tannin-based feed will help produce hides that have a much lower impact. This, too, is part of taking the long view. “Real, trusted numbers are important,” he says, “and we definitely want them for the future.”

Science-based

It is in this insistence on there being no need to race to the LCA finish-line (if there is one) that the irony occurs. Silvateam’s foundation work on lifecycle analysis began as long ago as 2015, which means it had a head-start on most of its peers. According to the founder of Spin 360, Federico Brugnoli, Silvateam has been a pioneer of LCA in leather chemicals, taking up the challenge at a time, he says, when there was little evidence of the potential returns. “It is important to underline that this approach was always science-based,” Mr Brugnoli says, “and driven by the need to understand more about the role that data can play.” He says that it is essential to capture accurate data relating to the sourcing of raw materials, which in Silvateam’s case means extracts from chestnut, quebracho and tara. Capturing data on the way these extracts work with other products in the tannery is the second part of this task. Having this data is becoming increasingly important, the Spin 360 founder says, at strategic and at commercial levels. He insists the relationship that his organisation has built up with the research and development and senior management teams at Silvateam bear this out.

“We were pioneers,” Antonio Battaglia agrees, “because we were the first to register an LCA process for tanning agents and we used it to carry out analyses of four of our products. Four products may seem like not many, but those four products accounted for something like 50% of our sales in the leather industry. There was hardly anyone in the leather manufacturing world looking at LCA at the time and we put the work we had done in a drawer. Then, more recently, leather manufacturers did start to become interested but many were using numbers based on averages and less qualitative proxies and we realised that there would be a lot of interest in our numbers because they are based on real, primary data.”

Work to build on the original four LCA studies began right away and now Silvateam has completed analysis of 50 of its top products, accounting for 90% of its sales. The plan now is to complete LCA exercises for another 30 or 40 Silvateam products in the next year. Day-to-day, month-to-month, this takes up a substantial number of work hours, but the company continues to work with Spin 360 to take the project forward. Together, they have developed a tool for its Ecotan technologies, which are in use among tanners producing leather for automotive, footwear and fashion. The Ecotan concept means using only natural products to make leather and finished leather products, with specialist partners ready to take the material back at the end of a product’s useful life for use in fertiliser. This makes the idea “truly circular”, Silvateam has said. With the new tool, it will now be able to calculate the impact of the whole range. “This is for the technology,” Mr Battaglia insists. “It is not the final number because the tanners will each have their own final numbers based on the work that they do in their tanneries, but they can use our data to help them calculate those numbers and also as a benchmark.”