Furious COTANCE response as anti-leather entrepreneur ‘crosses red line’
Leather industry representative body COTANCE has written to the European Patent Office (EPO) to complain about one of the finalists in a competition called the European Inventor Award.
One of 15 inventions that has a chance of winning the people’s vote in the 2021 European Inventor Award is Piñatex, a material that is made, in part, from waste from pineapple crops and which its inventor, Dr Carmen Hijosa, has long presented as an alternative to leather.
Dr Hijosa previously worked as a consultant in the leathergoods sector but began to consider fibres from pineapple leaves as an alternative material after visiting the Philippines in the 1990s and seeing poor practice in local tanneries as well as some use of the fibres from pineapple leaves in textiles.
As recently as the Safety Footwear Revolution Week event in November, COTANCE’s secretary general, Gustavo González-Quijano, took part in a panel discussion alongside Carmen Hijosa and the tone was polite and respectful. Mr González-Quijano said on that occasion: “It’s wrong to play one material against another. Every material has its merits and we have to make the best materials we can and promote each one on its own merits.”
At the same event, Dr Hijosa said it was a tribute to leather that humanity has made and used it since ancient times and she played down Piñatex’s ability to present itself as a competitor. She said: “Leather is very old and our little industry is very young and we are still fine-tuning our supply chain.”
But, in the formal presentation of Piñatex as a finalist in the 2021 European Inventor Award, Dr Hijosa took a different tone. She said there was enough waste from pineapple production to replace shoe leather entirely. Reflecting on what she had seen when visiting Asia more than 30 years earlier, she said in the official EPO video: “I realised that leather is unsustainable. It’s toxic for people and the environment. I saw it so clearly there at that time. I decided there and then that I didn’t want to work with leather any more.”
COTANCE has reacted furiously to this, saying in its letter to the EPO: “In claiming that leather is toxic, Dr Hijosa has crossed a red line. The European leather industry cannot tolerate such shameless public vilification.”
The letter went on to say the leather industry, particularly in Europe, had invested in sustainability for decades and that it was unfair for responsible producers of leather to be subjected to “negative propaganda” that had the potential to hurt their business.
It said Dr Hijosa’s presentation of Piñatex to the EPO was “pouring slander over the tanning industry and defaming a legitimate economic sector that creates wealth and jobs, sustainably, in many countries around the world”.
It criticised the EPO for failing to prevent a finalist in its competition from making “false and illegal comparative assertions” about leather.
