Fernando Bellese (ELP 2022) | Chief Sustainability Officer, PrimeAsia Leather Company, Brazil

I have spent the last 11 years of my career engaged in environmental discussions related to the Beef and Leather sectors. This includes working for companies that are looking for ways of developing more efficient, responsible, and resilient supply chains. It is important to make this clear, because the opinions below carry a biased perspective of somebody “from within” those sectors. Furthermore, this blog post has no intention of being an exhaustive, scientific based article—but rather, the sharing of experiences and opinions acquired throughout those years.

One thing that has caught my attention since the early years of my career is the fact that the loudest and more widely spread discussions around sustainability tend to be based on simplified and short messages. These short messages are normally backed by ingenious approaches and tools that allow different groups and corporations to make easy claims about complicated topics, undermining the need for more in-depth discussions.

A good example is the footwear and apparel sector. In the last 10 years, numerous companies and organizations—often created by the same companies—started to put together different approaches to calculate the impact of their products. They then began to elect the most sustainable options in ways that are easy to understand and communicate to consumers.

These are valuable ideas. However, the ways they are executed are questionable. Wrapped in creative names such as ‘Sustainability Indexes’ and ‘Environmental Profit & Loss Accounts', these tools create normalized factors that compare completely different materials. Business decisions are then based on the findings from these tools.

There are different problems surrounding these approaches and each of these deserve separate discussions. Factors such as selective criteria, adoption of different allocation rules, boundary definitions for LCAs (Life-cycle assessments), outdated data, and lack of transparency on the methodologies and data used are just some of the problems found in these initiatives.

A recent case has received a lot of attention in the last few years. The largest sustainability index in the global fashion sector has been criticized by different sectors working with natural fibers (cotton, wool, leather, silk, alpaca, jute). The most striking points for the representatives from these sectors are the fact that all these natural materials are among the topmost “unfavorable materials” while synthetic, petrochemical-based materials are among the “most sustainable” options, when evaluated by the index.

It is not just a matter of how natural materials perform in relation to synthetic materials – in an era where the main discussions are around climate change and the need for reducing the extraction and use of fossil fuels – but the fact that the impact of natural materials are calculated using outdated databases, relying on a high level of assumptions and lack of understanding about those sectors.

Additionally, the criteria selected for deciding what a sustainable product is and how those things are calculated tend to be more friendly to synthetic materials, while ignoring factors that are equally important in discussions related to sustainability but may not be so favorable towards those materials.

Considerations such as end of life, microplastic pollution, social costs of replacing farmed products, durability and repairability—which are mostly unfavorable to synthetic materials— are often left out of these discussions.

The same index mentioned above has been criticized by articles from the New York Times and The Intercept for its suspiciously friendly approach to synthetic materials made from fossil fuels and close ties with the fashion industry, which is highly dependent on those materials.

The index was also banned by the Norway Consumer Authority from being used in marketing to consumers, alleging lack of transparency and risk of misleading consumers, showing once again that simple messages and comparisons about sustainability can have negative effects on important environmental topics.  

Another important point is the fact that many of those natural materials are either a by-product of food production or an additional activity, complementing the livelihood of millions of farmers around the world.

Farming will not cease from existing. With the global population expecting to reach close to 10 billion people by 2050, the need for food production and consequently farming will only increase. The question should not be about using natural fibers instead of synthetic materials. Discussions should be about how these fibers can be produced in a more sustainable way, supporting the livelihood of farmers around the world and the development of more efficient farming systems. We must look at it under productivity, environmental and social perspectives all the while supporting the need for producing more food to feed the world.