Muirhead urges airlines to demand full traceability of leather hide sources
Image courtesy Muirhead
The advice from Muirhead follows the emergence 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 airlines and passenger 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.
Gareth Scott, Hide Procurement and By-Product Sales Director at Muirhead, 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, which has developed a unique circular process for leather manufacture, sources 99% of its hides from trusted farmers in the UK and Ireland. This enables the supplier to leverage the region’s exceptionally high animal welfare standards, keep hide miles to a minimum and ensure Muirhead leather does not contribute to forest depletion.
Through a variety of sustainable practices that ensure the preservation of global forests and biodiversity, Muirhead also complies with the new EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which requires leather manufacturers to demonstrate no involvement in deforestation or forest degradation.
By working with rawhide suppliers that adopt regenerative farming practices via land restoration and agroforestry, the company can demonstrate its impact on topsoil regeneration and improving the water cycle.
To ensure 100% 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. This stays with the hide throughout the entire leather manufacturing process.
Thanks to this rigorous system, Muirhead is able to trace the finished leather product back to the abattoir, as well as retrieve farm and cattle details using the same delivery reference.
Muirhead’s high performance leather products are trusted by more than 160 airlines, airframe and seating manufacturers globally – as well as most European bus, coach and rail operators. Last week, the company announced it had successfully returned to its pre-pandemic lead time of just six weeks, enabled by its unique end-to-end manufacturing process.
