Sustainable Leather Forum takes place in Paris
France’s national leather industry body, the Conseil National du Cuir, held the fourth edition of the Sustainable Leather Forum in Paris on September 12.
The organisation’s president, Frank Boehly, said on welcoming around 400 delegates that he was pleased to have speakers from all parts of the industry and from all parts of the world at the event. Leather chemicals manufacturers, including Smit & Zoon, Stahl, ATC and Silvateam, were represented during the forum’s different sessions, as were footwear groups Eram and Veja, and leather manufacturer Scottish Leather Group.
Former COTANCE president Andreas Kindermann, who recently left his role as chief executive of Wollsdorf Leather to set up his own leather industry consultancy, was also among the speakers.
Mr Boehly said he hoped the discussions that took place throughout the day would encourage critics of the leather industry “to meditate on a paradox”. He said it was clear to him that campaign groups and media commentators who think, for animal welfare reasons, that drinking milk and eating meat are bad believe that taking those animals’ hides to transform them into leather is even worse.
“The paradox,” he continued, “is that the alternative materials these groups prefer have a very high synthetics content and cannot replicate the properties of leather, but they prefer these materials because they can call them ‘vegan’. Plastic bags from supermarkets are vegan, but they have caused an environmental catastrophe. These groups cannot continue to present these alternative materials as progress without stopping to think about their impact.”
