Statement on the Sustainable Apparel Coalition's response to the Leather Industry

On 16/10/2020, the trade publication International Leather Maker Magazine (ILM), asked me to provide a statement on the lacklustre response from the SAC, via their blog, to the leather industry’s call for the SAC to suspend its Higg index score for leather.

For those not familiar with the MSI, it claims that silk is the world’s least sustainable fiber by a huge margin, with an impact of 1086/kilo. Alpaca comes next, with a purported impact of 320/kilo. Cow leather supposedly has an impact of 176/kilo.

This is the statement that I sent to the ILM.

The recent submissions to the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), by representatives of the silk, leather, and alpaca industries, followed by the SAC's dismissive response to all three, raises two important questions:

1. Who has the right to create, rate, and promote a Comparative Fibre Sustainability Index?

This is the crucial question.

Comparative sustainability scores are intended to cause economic harm. Producers of "unsustainable" fibers/materials are supposed to lose demand, market share, income, and eventually, to switch to producing something else - or if they can't, to go bankrupt.

So who has the right to make such life and death decisions?

In the case of the apparel sector, should such an index be backed and funded by the big brands - Adidas, Patagonia, Nike, Walmart? Or should it be firmly in the public sector?

Should it be in the hands of private individuals employed by vested interests, or in the hands of leaders in the science and economics community? 

Should it be behind a paywall, with source data, boundaries and methodologies invisible to those whose income and opportunities are being destroyed? Or do poor farmers have rights too? Should they be allowed to demand that the SAC or whoever, substantiate their claims, beyond all reasonable doubt, and after a rigorous independent review?

I would argue that it is unethical that the livelihoods of some of the poorest people on the planet, alpaca farmers of the altiplano, silk farmers in Cambodia or Laos, and so many others - farmers, who are almost never the wealthiest of any community - should be impacted by an index for which nobody is allowed to see the underlying data and methodologies, which was not developed by the scientific community, and which has never been subject to any kind of peer review.

All such indices should be taken out of the hands of the private sector where they are subject to manipulation. They should not be hidden behind paywalls that render their errors and inconsistencies invisible. They should be peer reviewed, accountable, and constantly updated, to reflect changes in both economics and technology.

2. Is the Higg MSI scientific, as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition claims?

It is impossible for outsiders to examine the studies ie. which Life Cycle Analysis, the MSI is using to base most of its impact scores on. I have only been able to analyse the underlying LCAs for silk and cotton - conventional and organic - so most of my examples come from those three underlying LCAs.

There are many inconsistencies and anomalies in the Sphera (Thinkstep)/Quantis/Higg MSI impact ratings. Here, I provide an illustrative sample. 

These more than demonstrate that the Higg MSI is not scientific, at all.

• On August 3, 2020, the Higg MSI was moved from the SAC’s website to the website of for profit Higg Co ($11 million funding from Buckhill Capital LP). In the process, and without explanation, the impact scores changed. Silk fabric for example, went from a global average impact rating of 681 per kilo, to 1086 per kilo. No clarification was offered for this 60% increase in impact, and the primary source remains identical to the source given for the 681 impact rating: “Quantis. World Apparel and Footwear Life Cycle Assessment Database (WALDB), version 2.0, 2018.” 

  That’s not science.

• Despite the fact that many other individual impact scores were changed at the same time - the average global impact of polyester fabric, for example, supposedly fell from 44 per kilo to 36.2 per kilo -  the economic allocation to leather, remained unchanged at 3.6%. This, despite the fact that even cursory examination of global leather or the Drop Credit, would have revealed that current economic allocation is less than half that, and so the MSI’s claimed impact for the global average of cow hides is at least double what it should be.

  That’s not science.

• The MSI/Quantis claims that a single study of the practices of 100 silk farmers in Tamil Nadu, as observed in 2006, accurately reflects internationally traded, gradable, bivoltine silk, in 2020 - almost all of which comes from China and is produced under very different conditions, and with much more favourable economic allocation. 

  That’s not science.

• For organic cotton the MSI/Thinkstep(Sphera) claims that average rainfall in Xinjiang, China, is 373mm per annum. For conventional cotton, they claim it is only 72mm per annum. 

  That’s not science.

• The MSI impact for silk, includes the impact of farmyard manure (used as a fertiliser), to assign a GWP of 67.2 per kilo, and eutrophication of 507 per kilo to raw silk. For organic cotton, on the other hand, the MSI excludes the impact of manure and so claims organic cotton fiber has a GWP of only 0.941 per kilo, and eutrophication of 2.9 per kilo. 

  That’s not science.