Specialist Scottish supplier of low-carbon high performance leather to the aviation, bus, coach, and rail industries Muirhead is encouraging airlines and passenger transport operators to ensure each hide they procure can be traced back to its origins. The company says that it has seen an increased number of leather suppliers whose products, despite being marketed as sustainable, ethical, and European, come from a complex and blurred supply chain, with hides imported from as far as South America.
The Scottish firm says transport operators deserve 100% transparency regarding the provenance of their leather hides and asserts that suppliers which fail to trace back their entire supply chain should be held accountable for potentially misleading customers. According to Muirhead, the lack of industry-wide traceability standards poses significant challenges for operators around Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting.
The firm’s Hide Procurement and By-Product Sales Director Gareth Scott said: “Operators are facing mounting pressure to take responsibility for their supply chains and demonstrate the full environmental and social impact of the materials they use. While leather is a natural by-product of the food industry, the finished product can only be considered sustainable if it is produced in a sustainable and ethical way.
“Sadly, some European leather manufacturers import rawhides from cattle reared on deforested lands in South America before marketing their finished products as European leather. These practices are rather concerning, given that extensive cattle ranching is the foremost driver of deforestation in almost every Amazon country – accounting for an alarming 80% of the current deforestation rate, as per WWF.
“Unless the supplier can trace the hide across the entire supply chain, operators will have no valid insight into the product’s ‘hide miles,’ the quality of the original rawhide, and whether their upstream suppliers such as farms and abattoirs uphold the highest ethical and sustainability standards.
“We believe radical traceability is the cornerstone of ethical leather production. That is why we encourage operators to ascertain that their leather suppliers are able to track every aspect of the product’s manufacture and distribution, from cradle to grave.”
Muirhead’s circular process for leather manufacture, which sources 99% of its hides from trusted farmers in the UK and Ireland, was featured in April in CBW issue 1576.
To ensure full traceability, Muirhead relies on the government-backed Cattle Tracing System, which operates in tandem with the Cattle Passport. Upon processing a hide, the licensed abattoir issues a commercial document which in turn is given a unique ID number, which stays with the hide throughout the entire leather manufacturing process and enables Muirhead to trace the finished leather product back to the abattoir, as well as retrieve farm and cattle details using the same delivery reference.
