Fashion brands that use leather are funding Amazon destruction, new study finds
Luxury and high street fashion brands are at risk of funding Amazon deforestation because of their links to the leather industry, new research published this week has revealed.
Supply chain research firm Stand.earth examined customs data that showed multiple connections between brands such as Coach, Prada, H&M, Adidas, Nike, Teva and Fendi to tanneries and producers of leather goods including JBS, Brazil’s largest leather exporter.
According to reports, more than 50 fashion brands have numerous links to JBS from within their supply chains. In 2021, the Guardian uncovered evidence linking JBS to Amazon deforestation, prompting the meat giant to commit to a zero deforestation pledge earlier this year, labelled ‘insufficient’ by environmental campaigners.
The study’s findings contradict policies recently announced by a number of the brands in question, in an attempt to distance themselves from JBS and other contributors to deforestation. According to Greg Higgs, researcher and contributor to the Stand.earth report, such policies were clearly ineffective.
“With a third of companies surveyed having some kind of policy in place, [you’d expect] that would have an impact on deforestation,” said Higgs. “The rate of deforestation is increasing, so the policies have no material effect.”
The fashion industry’s role in funding deforestation cannot be understated with projections showing that to meet consumer demand for shoes, jackets, handbags and other leather apparel, brands will need to purchase hides from 430 million cows per year by 2025.
1.5 billion cattle were slaughtered in 2019 according to figures from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), not including dairy, cementing the position the leather and fashion industries have as major contributors to one of the world’s most harmful and unsustainable practices - animal agriculture.
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Due to the lack of traceability between leather products and farms operating in the Amazon, the report cannot show links between specific brands and companies known to be responsible for deforestation. Instead, the analysis reveals an increase in the risk of leather originating from Amazon cattle ranches, the “number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country” according to the World Wide Fund for Nature.
Fashion companies with deforestation policies, of which there were 23 brands, were ‘likely’ to be breaking their own promises, the report stated. Luxury goods conglomerate LVMH - whose brands include Christian Dior, Fendi, Givenchy and Marc Jacobs - pledged to end its ties to deforestation by working with UNESCO, but was found to still have multiple supply links to known culprits of Amazon destruction.
Angeline Robertson, an investigative researcher involved in the study, said she hoped fashion companies would listen to their analysis and “work in their own self-interest” and that “in this time of climate emergency, if the fashion industry wants to be relevant, this is the opportunity.”
Céline Semaan, chief executive of Slow Factory, the environmental NGO partner in the report, said the fashion industry should not take this as a cue to simply find leather suppliers committing similar environmental crimes elsewhere in the world, such as in Mexico and Guatemala, but rather to put money into finding real alternatives including lab-grown and plant-based alternatives.
“At the end of the day, we have to find other solutions and other alternative leathers that are not animal-based and that are not plastic-based,” said Semaan. “With the resources that fashion companies have, there’s really no excuse.”
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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