Why Are Leather Handbags So Popular Today?
What is it about leather handbags that make them so intriguing?
Handbags come in a wide variety of sizes, colors, and styles. Maybe it is the butter-soft material they are made from.
There is also a fashion status attached to good leather handbags.
Many famous fashion-conscious women carry them, making them even more popular. A nice bag that completes an outfit can give someone a little extra confidence as they go about their day.
Leather in its most basic form is made from the hide of an animal.
First, the natural leather is cleaned to remove the hair and any other debris.
These hides are stretched and tanned through the use of a chemical process.
During this time, depending on the process and chemicals used the type of leather produced is determined
. It can be from very soft leather to suede to hard stiff leather depending on how it is treated.
Fashion designers use this leather to make many products, not just leather handbags.
There are also shoes, belts, and hats. So an entire ensemble can be achieved.
No one wants to have the wrong shoes with the right bag.
Leather is a very durable material that can withstand everyday use, wear, and tear the average person can put on it.
It is one of the reasons leather is such a popular material to use in clothing.
There are still many vintage leather handbags out there, and rarely do they go out of style.
What is the duration of natural leather?
Leather goods are made to last a lifetime.
But you have to take care of them. The best way is to keep them clean and supple with the use of a good leather cleaner.
Leather cleaners can smell bad so if you are planning to use your bag on the weekend it would be better to clean it earlier in the week. Before cleaning your bag with any product it is always recommended to test it on an area that won’t be seen.
Important note about natural leather…!!
Just in case the cleaner is too harsh and changes the color or texture of the leather.
Usually after a good cleaning, your leather handbags will look brand new.
There are many animal rights groups that are trying to ban or just discourage people from the use of leather in fashion.
Some of these groups are very aggressive and will try to destroy animal goods by throwing paint on them. Or just make the owner feel immense guilt over the use of leather.
Why some groups of people are avoiding using natural leather?
What these groups are fighting against is an age-old tradition.
The earliest man made his clothing from the hides of the animals he killed. In most cases these animals are not killed just for the hide, the whole animal is used for a variety of purposes. Most importantly they are used for food.
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Abstract of leather…
The fashion industry is responsible for a significant contribution to environmental pressure in the European Union.
The present study aims to quantify the environmental impacts of a leather shoe production chain and identify the most criticalities in terms of companies, processes, and materials.
The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology was used to assess the impacts related to the production of a pair of classic man leather shoes.
Slaughtering and tanning resulted in the less environmentally sustainable stages for almost all the analyzed impact categories, except water resource depletion and ozone layer depletion.
Such outcomes are mainly due to the high distance from animal skin suppliers to slaughterhouses and tanneries, the use of lorries transport, and the large use of unsustainable chemicals to treat the leather.
Going downstream, the main hot spot refers to the use of cotton during upper manufacturing and shoe assembly and finishing.
Three alternative realistic production scenarios were simulated to find the best sustainable mix.
They focused on alternative means of transport, the substitution of cotton, and green purchasing of upper and lining. An environmental impact reduction of about 30% can be obtained if all the suggested scenarios are implemented.
Natural leathers backstage…!
During the last few years, consumers’ awareness of sustainability themes is rapidly increasing, especially in certain markets (e.g. Northern Europe or Japan).
Moreover, European and International governments are issuing long-term programs to set a strategic vision with the aim of drastically reducing the impacts caused by human activities on the environment (European Parliament and Council Citation 2013).
Therefore, the environmental sustainability concept is currently a key aspect to take into account (Costantini et al. Citation2017).
This is particularly interesting in the context of products manufactured through different production steps, involving stakeholders in a complex supply chain (SC). Indeed, the themes of SC management (SCM), SC efficiency, and sustainable SCM have become very important at both the industry and research levels (Liu, Leat, and Hudson Smith Citation2011; Pires Ribeiro and Barbosa-Povoa Citation2018; Scavarda et al.
Citation2019; Bevilacqua, Ciarapica, and Giacchetta Citation2008). SC network design should incorporate carbon emissions and environmental policies aimed at achieving substantial emission reductions and lower resource consumption (Waltho, Elhedhli, and Gzara Citation2019; Bevilacqua et al. Citation2011; Sangwan, Choudhary.
However, environmental sustainability is currently not practiced in many industries’ SC. No clear strategies to achieve sustainability across SC have been outlined and thus further investigations by using consolidated environmental assessment methods are necessary for the most impactful industries (Suhi et al. Citation2019).
Considering the industrial sector, the fashion industry (particularly companies involved in the production of clothing and footwear goods) is responsible for a significant contribution to the environmental pressure in the European Union (Styles, Schoenberger, and Galvez-Marts Citation2012; Muthu Citation2015).
Also, due to public scandals (e.g. animal mistreatment, use of unhealthy substances, unsafe working conditions for operators involved in the production chain), the fashion industry is emerging as one of the most criticized industries (Turker and Altuntas Citation2014; Winter and Lasch Citation2016).
Due to the consolidation in the last decades of the fast-fashion approach (i.e. rapid acquisition and disposal of mass-produced fashion items), companies need to innovate their business models towards more sustainable solutions (Tran and Jeppesen Citation2016; Todeschini et al. Citation2017).
According to a recent report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (Citation2017), the current system for producing, distributing, and using clothing is extremely wasteful and polluting, and following the current trend of the fashion/textile industry impacts, the consequences will be potentially catastrophic for the entire planet.
The proper management of environmental and social sustainability challenges in the fashion industry requires considering both internal processes and products, as well as aspects related to the entire SC network (Moretto et al. Citation2018).
Focusing on footwear products, different literature studies have been developed to promote the environmental sustainability concept within this industrial sector.
Herva, Álvarez, and Roca (Citation2011) presented a methodology to combine ecological footprint and environmental risk assessment for the development of sustainable and safe children’s shoes.
Luximon and Jiang (Citation2016) investigated the role of fitting and comfort features in the environmental impact of footwear products, by analyzing the influence on product service life.
Caniato et al. (Citation2012) presented a study to clarify the most important drivers and the most common practices used by international brands to improve their environmental sustainability.
Tatàno et al. (Citation2012) characterize the chemical/physical properties of shoe manufacturing wastes (mainly synthetic processing origin) and investigated their reuse as soil organic-nitrogen fertilizers (derived from vegetable-tanned leather wastes).
Also, the footwear end of life has been analyzed by several studies, to understand the opportunities related to material recycling (Lee and Rahimifard Citation2012) and remanufacturing (Dissanayake and Sinha Citation 2015).
Specific attention has been posed by researchers on the leather industry (Chowdhury et al. Citation2018; Moktadir et al. Citation2018), a key segment of the leather shoe SC. For example, Bhavan, Rao, and Nair (Citation2008) developed a new leather processing technique based on a biochemical approach, to reduce the chemical oxygen demand in the wastewater generated by tanneries.
Chen, Lin, and Lee (Citation2014) presented a study about the carbon footprint of aniline leather in a cradle-to-gate scenario.
Kılıç et al. (Citation2018) assessed the corporate carbon footprint of a tannery in Turkey discovering that most of the impacts are due to solid waste landfilling and electricity/fuel required during the different processing phases.
Milà I Canals et al. (Citation2002) used life cycle assessment (LCA) to investigate the most critical hot spots in the chrome-tanned bovine leather (i.e. the most widespread leather typologies in the footwear industry), as well as to define a regional environmental label for leather products.
Similarly, Notarnicola et al. (Citation2011) derived the eco-profiles of two product systems concerning the bovine leather manufactured in Italy and Spain.
More recently, Tasca and Puccini (Citation2019) carried out an LCA to estimate impacts on the environment and human health related to retaining, fatliquoring, and dyeing phases during leather tanning.
In their case study, the most critical items resulted in the electricity needed for drum rotation and the production of azo dyes.
Daddi et al. (Citation2016), instead, developed a specific LCA-based methodology to analyze the environmental sustainability of a cluster of companies and experimented with it in a tanning district in the Tuscany region, Italy.
One of the first LCA studies completely focused on shoes was presented by Perdijk, Luijten, and Selderijk (Citation1994) who developed an eco-labeling of footwear products and established a basis for future studies in this field.
Successively, Albers, Canepa, and Miller (Citation2008) compared the environmental profile of a pair of shoes made of conventional materials (mainly leather, rubber, and plastic parts) by the Simple Shoe brand, with three other variants made with green materials.
Results indicated that traditional shoes are the most impactful, but relevant details about materials inventory and modeling are lacking.
Also, the analyzed products cannot be considered classic leather shoes.
Rivera Muñoz (Citation2013) carried out water, energy, and carbon footprints of a pair of leather shoes manufactured in Mexico.
However, the modeling of key materials such as leather is too simplified to be considered reliable.
Gottfridsson and Zhang (Citation2015) analyzed the impacts of shoes through the LCA methodology, but they mainly focused on the influence of shoe consumption of Swedish customers and considers different typologies of shoes (i.e. waterproof, rubber and plastic, leather, textile).
Also, Silvestre Zottin (Citation2019) developed an interesting LCA-based study for three different footwear models in an eco-friendly company, but this study considered sneakers shoes.
Gül et al. (Citation2015), instead, investigated the problem of how to define the product environmental footprint category rules for footwear products.
However, this study is completely focused on non-leather shoes.
The most interesting related studies have been presented by Milà et al. (Citation1998) and Cheah et al. (Citation2013).
However, in the first one, a simplified and semi-quantitative methodology has been applied; this certainly reduces the significance and the reliability of the obtained results.
The second one, instead, only considers the global warming potential indicator and is focused on running shoes.
More recently, different sports brands (i.e. Puma and Nike) conducted a carbon footprint of their running shoes (Puma Citation2009; Nike Citation2010).
Also, an Italian company certified a model of their outdoor shoes (Environmental Product Declaration – EPD) according to the Product Category Rules (PCR) for leather shoes (AKU Citation 2017).
The present study aims to integrate the state of the art by proposing an environmental impact assessment study, based on the standard LCA methodology, focused on a SC of classic leather shoes.
This can be considered a gate-to-gate analysis, including all the phases and stakeholders from slaughterhouse and skin conservation to shoe manufacturing.
Ten different categories calculated through the ILCD 2011 Midpoint impact assessment method have been used to identify the environmental hotspots of the analyzed SC, simulate different scenarios, and propose possible opportunities to reduce the negative impacts.
Several novelties and improvements over the state-of-the-art shortcomings can be identified:
(i) This study focuses on classic leather shoes, while the existing studies mainly concern other typologies such as running shoes, casual shoes, sneakers, etc.
(ii) The inventory of the present LCA is very detailed considering the entire SC (except the farming step), while in literature studies major simplifications have been observed particularly on shoe materials, with unavoidable negative effects on results reliability.
(iii) A small set of indicators is usually adopted in existing LCA studies (e.g. only global warming potential), while the present one considers ten impact categories to have a comprehensive view of the environmental impacts and their causes.
(iv) As a general comment, this study is essential to highlight the importance of having a complete view of the SC to effectively pursue environmental sustainability, especially in the fashion and shoe production sectors.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 presents the Material and Method for the LCA study with full details about the inventory data used for the assessment and a description of the Life Cycle Impact Assessment phase.
Section 3 reports the interpretation of the obtained results, and Section 4 compares different alternative production scenarios, and contains a discussion about related benefits. Finally, in Section 5 some conclusions and proposals for future work are included.
