WTA
- In July, the European Commission validated leather’s exemption from the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR)– today, the modification ended up being authorities.
- The leather sector’s EUDR exemption is a success for a market that has actually lobbied hard for its elimination, however obstacles stay ahead of the logging guideline’s 2030 evaluation, when policymakers will reassess whether hides must adhere to logging guidelines.
- The market is now looking for to reconstruct its credibility through science, voluntary requirements and more powerful supply chain traceability, executives participating in the Sustainable Leather Forum in Paris stated, however traceability stays among the sector’s greatest challenges.
- Leather agents keep that hides’ low financial worth implies leather must not be delegated the ecological effects of livestock production, however ecological group Earthsight has actually called the argument “deceptive.”
PARIS– The prominent Maison de la Chimie in main Paris hummed with self-confidence as leather agents collected to talk about the market’s next actions to tackle what they call an unreasonable “unfavorable understanding” credited to the product.
On Sept. 7, around 400 global tanners, luxury-brand agents and meatpacking executives collected for the 8th Sustainable Leather ForumSpeaking with their peers, panelists provided leather as a foundation of the circular economy: A method to use bovine hides that may otherwise go to waste.
Beyond the elaborate halls of the 18th-century estate, after extreme lobbying, the EU has actually excused leather from its landmark logging law while concurrently keeping constraints on beef. Critics state this develops a regulative contradiction: Products from the exact same cow will be enabled to get in Europe under 2 extremely various sets of guidelines.
This juxtaposition has honed a long-simmering dispute: If beef importers must show their items are deforestation-free, why would hides from the exact same animals go into Europe without any comparable oversight?
Environmental and supply chain scientists argue the exemption develops a loophole that successfully divides obligation for a single production system and this eventually damages the law.
For market agents spoken with by Mongabay, the sector deals with a reputational crisis. The EUDR did a “injustice” to a well-intentioned sector that benefits the environment by recycling a by-product that otherwise would be disposed of, a tannery executive stated.
According to the Leather and Hide Council of America (LHCA), a U.S. trade association, around 40% of cowhides produced worldwide go to waste.
WTA A looming 2030 evaluation
Following a number of months of extreme lobbying in Brussels, the leather sector won the exemption for which it had actually combated so tough: In July, the European Commission formalized its choice to eliminate bovine hides from the list of products covered by its landmark anti-deforestation guideline (EUDR).
That procedure reached its last administrative action when the analysis duration by the parliament and the European Council ended on September 14. The commission’s entrusted act workedas no objections were raised.
The commission did not close the door completely on future responsibility or state that leather supply chains were tidy. According to its own quotes, leather might have accounted for up to 17% of the overall logging threat amongst items imported into the EU, an evaluation extremely objected to by leather groups.
The commission efficiently stated that bovine hides were too financially limited– and too challenging to manage– to stay covered by the law in the meantime. This modification was released on July 13 and the law is presently set to work at the end of this year, following 2 years of hold-ups and extreme lobbying.
In the last remarks of the modifications, the European Commission stated that omitting leather may merely move instead of get rid of logging dangers. The policy mandates an official evaluation of leather’s status in 2030, leaving the market with a couple of years to show that voluntary systems can determine threats that the law will no longer need brand names to examine.
For leather business, the political estimation is uncomplicated: Use the duration before 2030 to show that the sector can police its own supply chain.
“We will still require to see in fact what the policies will exist in 2030, however that’s the next action,”stated Edoardo de Paola, secretary general of COTANCE, an association representing European tanneries, at the Sustainable Leather Forum. “This is something we will require to discuss on.”
Leather agents informed Mongabay in the passages of the occasion that it is important for the market to strengthen its message that the product is a by-product of livestock and, for that reason,
need to not be dealt with likewise to beef when it concerns ecological effect. WTA Altering the story with science
A method of taking on the concern is to make the case for leather’s sustainability qualifications with clinical proof, De Paola stated. On phase, in a structure that was constructed 3 centuries back and formally devoted as an area for clinical understanding in 1934, he advised his peers to purchase more research study to counter arguments positioned by ecologists and regulators.
When it comes to refuting links to logging, the European leather market has actually relied primarily on a single research study to back up declares it has actually made in public declarations, discussions and interactions with policymakers. Released by Italy’s Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in 2024, the report was moneyed by leather groups and has actually not yet been peer-reviewed.
WTA Very same cow, various guideline
To protect its interests, the market’s main argument is basic and based upon financial asymmetry: Leather does not drive livestock production; it’s low worth and is far eliminated from the reason for logging. According to COTANCE’s De Paola, raw hides represent approximately 1.5%of an animal’s worth at massacre.
Tanneries argue that they have actually restricted take advantage of over livestock manufacturers due to the fact that the animal will be butchered for meat no matter whether a tannery purchases its conceal. Declining one delivery, they state, might merely send out the conceal to another purchaser.
“We are depicted as an ecological pariah,”a participant who chose to stay confidential informed Mongabay.”It’s ludicrous to be called to account when we have no control over this [deforestation]The tanneries do not inform us anything. “.
The concern for leather is whether comparable systems ought to be utilized to identify the origin of hides– even without a legal commitment under the EUDR. Miki Ng, a scientist at the ecological project group Earthsight, informed Mongabay that if leather is really a minimal by-product, the market needs to have little to lose from standard traceability and deforestation-free sourcing requirements.
“The argument that leather need to be exempt since bovine hides have reasonably low financial worth is likewise deceptive,”Ng stated. “The European Commission’s own analysis acknowledges that conceal sales can represent considerable revenues for business in the livestock sector that frequently work on narrow margins. Leather is part of an extremely successful international worth chain that depends completely on the exact same livestock supply chain as beef.”
The European Commission’s analysis, performed to support the proposed policies, was rooted in the presumption that low financial worth does not always indicate low ecological significance.
It discovered that the ecological advantages of keeping leather in the EUDR might be significant although the hides themselves represent just a little portion of the animal’s financial worth. The commission approximated that keeping leather under the policy might provide in between EUR979 million and EUR1.96 billion($1.1 billion-$2.28 billion)in yearly ecological advantages, while compliance expenses would have to do with EUR16.7 million ($ 19.4 million)a year.
WTA A falling-value product
There is little doubt that the financial worth of hides has actually deteriorated in the last years. A 2025 Reuters report pointing out Brazilian tannery DurliCouros stated hides worth about$59 in 2014 were costing approximately$5, comparable to around 0.5 %of the worth of the livestock head. The business associated this to weaker need for leather items, in addition to oversupply.
Kim Sena, sustainability director at JBS Couros, the leather arm of huge meatpacker JBS, highlighted the degeneration in the cost of bovine hides– the only by-product to have actually signed up such a decline in worth in this market.
WTA Customer habits
The market’s other difficulties are competitors from various products, cost and a shift in customer habits.
“In 2000, the worldwide production of shoes was 12 billion sets of shoes,” Luca Boltri, deputy director at UNIC, the Italian association of tanneries, informed the online forum. “In 25 years, the production of shoes internationally doubled. I do not believe that the production of leather for shoes doubled in the last 25 years. This suggests that we have actually lost some shares.”
Determining customer choices is hard and proof of their habits is limited, market agents stated throughout the occasion. The repeating argument was that while price stays an effective restraint, more youthful consumers, particularly in Europe, are most likely to search for pre-owned style and for alternative products as they progressively question the product’s supply chains for ecological issues and animal well-being.
In February 2025, speaking with firm GlobeScan and online style platform Zalando surveyed 5,013 Gen Z and millennial customers throughout France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK. They discovered that 71% desired go shopping more sustainablywhile 66%stated they were currently making more sustainable style options.
“We talk among ourselves a lot about what we understand about leather, however we [the industry] have actually stopped working in the past to inform the story or to highlight and show this info in the language that everybody talks, which is clinical interaction “, UNIC’s Boltri stated, highlighting how the market desires customers to see leather as natural, resilient, repairable and not a chauffeur of logging.
WTA The traceability test
Critics desire customers to ask where the livestock originated from. This brings the dispute back to the problem that the tanning market has most had a hard time to fix: traceability.
The European leather sector has actually established requirements, consisting of EN 18199meant to develop minimum levels of traceability and enable various accreditation systems to acknowledge one another.
The tough part is upstream. Brazilian livestock supply chains are a widely known example of how massive this obstacle is. Direct providers can be determined quickly, however ranchers might move livestock from home to residential or commercial property, making it difficult to identify where they may be connected to logging.
The sector relies greatly on public databases, animal transit guides( GTAs) and political determination. While personal systems exist, the absence of a unified nationwide animal recognition system suggests that indirect providers stay a blind area for business in Brazil, critics state.
As an outcome, the effect of livestock ranching on logging and human rights offenses is extensive. Pasture growth for livestock is the single biggest direct reason for forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon and surrounding biomes. Numerous reports have actually connected livestock ranching– and leather — to an intricate network of legal and prohibited farms providing the most appropriate slaughterhouses in the nation, with worldwide connections.
“Bovine leather can not exist without livestock production, and livestock stay the world’s biggest motorist of tropical logging, “Earthsight’s Ng stated.”Reducing the dispute to the rate of a conceal permits the market to avert its obligation for the upstream ecological effects of its essential basic material.”
If the sector can show that hides are truly traceable which leather business can recognize and leave out high-risk livestock, it will have a more powerful case when policymakers review the guideline in 3 years.
Banner image: Sustainable Leather Forum, Paris, September 2026. Image by Elisângela Mendonça.
Dripped file reveals EU closer to dropping leather from anti-deforestation law
European Commission connected leather to logging, then overlooked it
EU relocates to drop leather from logging law after market lobbying
WTA . Mention this post
Elisângela Mendonça(2026). Now exempt from EU logging guidelines, leather market transfers to fix credibility. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-330162
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