| Résumé : |
Life cycle assessment (LCA), as defined by ISO 14040 and ISO 14044, sets the framework for how a system can be studied to understand its environmental impact in one or several impact categories. It is a relative assessment, relative to the functional/declared unit, the reference flow, the goal and scope of the study and the communication message that the owners of the system (being studied) want to distribute.
The ISO documents do not give clear advice on how to make every decision, this depends entirely on what the LCA analyst and their client want to do. Guidance higher than ISO 14040/44 are available that start to constrain the choices the analyst and their client makes. For leather these form other product environmental footprint (PEF) studies, product category rules (PCR, e.g. EN 16887) or the PEF category rules (PEF-CR). Another valuable tool that allows a company to do a verifiable LCA is to use similar choices to die aggregated LCA studies that have been performed for a value chain (or product). For leather, recent aggregated LCA studies have been performed by the Leather Working Group (LWG), Leather Hide and Council of America (LHCA), Green Deal for Leather Project and Leather Naturally (LN), and work has begun on the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UN1D0) study.
Even going as far back as the European Commission's PEF-CR guidelines, it has been clear that there are environmental hotspots in the manufacture of leather. The largest contributor to the environmental footprint of leather is the impacts that are allocated to leather from the farming sector. |
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Leather LCA and chemicals in INTERNATIONAL LEATHER MAKER (ILM), N° 66 (07-08/2024)
