COTANCE has called on prominent certification bodies active in the traceability segment to work out together a set of minimum technical requirements for facilitating mutual and official recognition. COTANCE will follow up this call by contacting them individually for eventually setting together a next steps programme of activities.
The decision: COTANCE, at its Council meeting on 22 September 2022 in Milan, decided to offer certification bodies a meeting point, and negotiate a core package that would help them to serve the best interests of the leather industry and its value chain.
- COTANCE, the Confederation of National Associations of Tanners and Dressers of the European Community, chairs the European standardisation body CEN TC 289 wherein such an agreement can then be officially consecrated, allowing also to be referenced in legislation.
The reasoning for this: Transparency and traceability gathering prominence in the leather market, as legislation and customer requests aim to provide information to consumers on how, by whom, and where products are made.
- Traceability constitutes a particular challenge for the leather industry, as it has been documented though a 2011 COTANCE Project on the subject.
- Hides and skins get their identity separately from the animal at a slaughterhouse, and information on the previous lifecycle is lost in the vast majority of cases around the globe.
- The information about raw materials, in particular the origin of the hides or skins, is paramount for the quality of leather.
- Leather industry certification bodies are looking into this issue. However, a proliferation of different and diverse approaches on traceability risks are leading to an impasse of mutually-not-recognised certifications, and an increase in unproductive expenses for operators who are forced by customers to follow several schemes and end up with audit fatigue.
- Such dysfunction can be minimised and even avoided if certification bodies agree on a set of core traceability principles and rules on a pre-competitive basis.
