by Marie-Anne Gauly
Our mission at Adapta is to fight against the waste of materials.
Our job is to find a 2nd life for materials that have already been produced and are lying dormant in the warehouses of luxury houses and their suppliers.
And that's easy to measure. In 2020, for example, our customers bought nearly 4 tonnes of leather from us to produce new leather goods, footwear or decorative items.
But what does 4 tonnes of leather mean? What impact does it have on the environment? To what extent (however modest) do we contribute to more responsible production and consumption?
Quite quickly, we decided that we needed to quantify this in terms of indicators that could be compared with those of other stages of production, other industries and other players.
The adventure turned out to be more complex than we imagined: missing scientific data, unvalidated allocation rules, debates about what should and shouldn't be taken into account... it took us a while to understand the state of the art!
To give you an image, it's like trying to do accounting in a world without accounting standards, without a central bank, with experts who are still learning.
Nevertheless, a few weeks later, after a lot of discussions and a lot of nice meetings, and with the help and expertise of the start-up Oksigen, we came up with a result that we can trust and that allows us to calculate the CO2 emissions and water consumption avoided. A tool that gives us this information for ourselves, but also for each of our customers.
1. The (positive) impact of our business
The logic is clear: resources are limited on Earth; if our customers did not use leathers from dead stock, they would have had to have others produced. This non-production is therefore a gain for the planet.
In 2020, our customers bought 3000m2 of leather from us (those famous 4 tonnes).
And 3000m2 of leather requires* :
The use of 140,000 litres of water, equivalent to 2,300 showers, or the annual drinking water needs of 150 people.
The emission of 11,000 kg of CO2, equivalent to 57,000 km covered by a car or 1.44 times around the earth.
It's still small, but every step counts (the famous legend of the hummingbird that tries to put out the fire on its own scale, carrying water in its little beak to contribute to the common good). And it's 2 times better than in 2019 and hopefully 3 times worse than in 2021.
Finally, a brief aside on methodology, which will be the subject of other posts in a few weeks' time to explain the debates and our rather cautious choices:
We still have no data on the impact of vegetable tanning; we have therefore treated vegetable-tanned leather as chrome-tanned leather, which greatly underestimates the use of water.
We have not taken into account animal husbandry - just bear in mind that if we took into account the share of the economic value generated by the hide (~3.5%), CO2 emissions would be multiplied by at least 10. This hypothesis is therefore not trivial and we will explain why, for the moment, we are not taking it into account.
We have not taken into account our entire stock, but only what we have sold, because what is in our stock is simply moved, not saved.
2. What does this mean for you as a customer?
The impact of tanning a hide varies according to different criteria, but if you have sourced from us, we can make a fairly basic cross product and say that if you bought 1m2 of leather from us, you avoided on average* :
The use of 47 litres of water, equivalent to almost 1 shower.
The emission of 4 kgs of CO2, equivalent to 20 km covered by a car or ½ lap of the Paris ring road.
To get a real feel for what this means for our customers, we did the exercise on one of them: Réuni, a DNVB and responsible fashion brand, based on pre-orders, which has been growing since its creation in 2019. Réuni is launching its 1st line of leather goods this month and has ordered nearly 700m2 of leather from us.
We have calculated the exact impact by taking into account the support (i.e. the animal), the weight and the tanning, as well as the transport (going through us adds an extra journey in Europe; we have therefore reduced the impact saving by the same amount).
If Réuni had had these leathers produced, it would have required* :
The use of 28,000 litres of water, equivalent to 464 showers or the annual drinking water requirement of 30 people.
The emission of 2 tonnes of CO2, equivalent to 10,000 km covered by a car or 294 laps of the Paris ring road.
We hope to be able to develop this impact calculation service for our customers. Let us know if you're interested!
3. A couple of estimates scale
As you can see, the production of materials, like the production of a product, is never neutral. Whether you buy from us or not, here are a few points to help you understand how to source more responsibly:
Aldehyde tanning (metal-free) generates 5% more CO2 than Chrome tanning. Now, the subject isn't that simple, and we'll come back to it in a later post.
On average, tanning in Asia generates 15% more CO2 than tanning in Europe. The use of water is probably similar, but water reprocessing is on average much better in Europe because of the Reach regulations.
Tanning cattle generates on average 4 times more CO2 than sheep or goats, and uses 4 times more water. The uses are not the same, but keep this in mind for your linings, for example.
Transport can have a big impact on the ecological cost of the material. 1 journey by lorry in Europe or by boat from Asia will account for less than 10% of the material's impact. On the other hand, if you choose to fly, this cost rises to 42% in Europe and 73% from Asia. We're always short of time, and the cargo crisis isn't making things any easier at the moment, but it's an emission item that can be optimised. Here's a little diagram to illustrate the point*:
As you can see, leather is a specialist market and the subject is vast 😊
We'll tell you more in the coming weeks!
* Sources: adapta data for leather consumption; truck/boat/plane km via Google Maps; Ademe GHG balance sheet for emission factors for different transport; leather impact base from ADEM. Methodology provided and validated by Oksigen.
Photo credits: Anastasia Taioglou, Erik Odin, Réuni
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