What You Should Know About SC Mapping and Traceability in the Leather Industry
What the leather industry needs to know about supply chain mapping and traceability for the EU Deforestation Regulation
Leather is a key commodity for industries ranging from footwear to home goods, automotive and aerospace. The new EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) requires companies importing products made with leather to provide supply chain mapping down to the individual operators in the beef supply chain. Below are some important considerations for beef and leather importers subject to the EUDR.
GPS
Unlike fruit crops, the EUDR does not require polygon GPS mapping of cattle growing operations, but every stage of cattle production must be mapped down to GPS points. This includes all of the sites involved in breeding, feeding, and slaughter of cattle. In countries with established cattle traceability schemes, this should be relatively straightforward; however, some areas with high deforestation risk may also lack automated traceability data collection. With EUDR enforcement slated for the end of 2024, it’s important to reach out to beef suppliers now to ensure that the addresses of beef operations are being tracked and are available to share.
Legality
The EUDR calls for importers to establish the legality of the operators in the leather supply chain. Certifications such as LWG and ISO can be useful in establishing the legitimacy of industrial sites such as tanneries and slaughterhouses, but importers will have to go beyond certification schemes to collect legality documents from operators such as breeders and feeders. A stream of chain-of-custody documents may also need to be collected from upstream suppliers to provide evidence of the supply chain - these often take the form of orders, invoices, receipts and shipment documents scrubbed of financial information.
Deforestation
The EU has compiled an extensive resource for importers to determine that their suppliers are not contributing to deforestation or forest degradation. This comes in the form of an open-source Observatory that is continuously updated with authoritative data. Companies will still need to adopt a valid methodology for assessing the risk of deforestation and to perform the analysis on a continuous basis to prepare a Due Diligence Statement (DDS). The DDS must precede every shipment that is imported into the EU.