Methane emissions increasingly matter in sustainability circles, and fashion has a significant methane footprint. But fresh calls to abandon wool, leather and other animal-derived fibres risk swapping one set of problems for another and ignoring credible pathways to lower-impact animal-fibre systems
LONDON – The livestock–methane debate is getting louder. Governments, retailers and farm groups are trialling direct methane interventions in ruminant systems, from feed additives and so-called methane “blockers” such as 3-NOP in dairy and feedlot settings to seaweed-based supplements in pilots.
The science is evolving, and while the results are mixed, it is clear that methane is now moving from an afterthought inside CO₂-equivalent figures to a headline metric in its own right.
Into this shifting landscape a new white paper recently dropped from Collective Fashion Justice (CFJ). CFJ’s report is the most comprehensive, likely only, report to date focusing solely on methane and animal-derived fibres. The paper estimates fashion’s methane footprint at 8.3 million tonnes per year and attributes roughly three quarters of that to animal-derived materials, namely leather, wool and cashmere.
The report claims animal fibres have a hugely outsized methane footprint, despite their small share of the global fibre mix.
The methods used in the report follow standard LCA practice. They include a systematic literature review, gap-filling life-cycle inventories and allocation using the (far from perfect!) Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR) on farm and economic allocation at slaughter for hides. UNIDO rules are applied to leather.
CFJ’s policy recommendation is to reduce and ultimately phase out methane-intensive animal materials, to prioritise recycled animal inputs where needed and to back fossil-free biomaterials as they mature. More generally, the paper also calls for the decarbonisation of textile mills through electrification and renewables, a message I am sure we can all get behind.
The message to brands from the report appears to be to separate methane out from generic CO₂ emissions and manage it directly.
The CFJ report arrives at an interesting time for animal derived fibres. I visited the recent IWTO Congress in Lille and it was hard not to be impressed by the amount of research and innovation going on in the animal fibres space, despite the clear financial headwinds the sector is facing.
One of the most notable presentations in Lille was of a new pre-print paper led by Paul Swan, which argues that most wool LCAs “count the exits, not the entrances.”
We will be running a full review of this paper in the forthcoming Natural Fibres Insight (which goes live on our website next week) so we won’t go too much into it for now.
But, in summary, the authors set out to reassess published wool studies through an ISO-aligned biogenic lens and show how stocking, pasture and manure-to-soil pathways can materially alter the climate balance for wool.
They found that when a realistic share of manure carbon is incorporated into soils, modelled CO₂-equivalent intensities fall sharply from conventional baselines. None of this erases enteric methane, which still dominates ruminant footprints. However, it shows why management matters and why outcome-based assessment (rather than simple material labels) is essential if we want a holistic view on animal fibre impacts (which surely must be the goal).
On the issue of leather, CFJ’s approach follows PEFCR and UNIDO guidance, which is standard in LCA.
CFJ’s report applies emissions allocations that effectively treat leather as a high-emission material in its own right. Yet the Leather and Hide Council of America (LHCA) (and others) argue that leather is primarily a byproduct of meat production. Without demand from fashion, hides would often be landfilled or destroyed, creating waste and emissions without offsetting value.
Actually, millions of hides are destroyed each year. Is it not more sensible to use these rather than turn to leather alternatives which are usually held together by plastic and few, if any, of which have an actual LCA to support their claims? I’ve yet to hear a coherent response to this question.
The LHCA’s Hide Economics analysis notes that only around 3.5 per cent of livestock emissions are allocated to hides at the slaughterhouse level, under internationally recognised methodologies such as the EU Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) rules. Is it accurate (or fair?) to pin the climate costs of raising cattle on fashion’s leather trade, when livestock are farmed primarily for food?
There is a broader picture here. Total global methane emissions are in the order of six hundred million tonnes a year. On that baseline, CFJ’s 8.3 million tonnes is roughly 1.4 per cent of the total. If three quarters of that is animal-material related, the animal-fibre share is around one per cent of global methane.
That is not trivial, but it is also not the dominant slice of the global methane pie.
Regenerative Farming
What about “regenerative” farming? CFJ is right that regenerative claims do not stop methane and that soil carbon is not an infinite sink. Soils reach a new equilibrium, permanence and additionality must be tested, and some feed-additive fixes have under-performed outside controlled settings or are limited to confined systems.
But none of that makes management irrelevant. Long-term grassland work shows that, under certain regimes, mixed systems can build soil carbon, improve water outcomes and reduce off-farm inputs.
There is a huge amount of work under way here, so the sensible course is surely not to shut it down but to put guardrails around it. Back well-designed trials, publish baselines for methane intensity, fund independent monitoring and scale only what the science supports. Reward producers who deliver measured improvements and retire the approaches that do not.
While animal-fibre sectors should not be allowed to wave away methane with marketing (some of the hype around regenerative agriculture is excessive at times) they should be required (and enabled) to demonstrate measured improvements in methane intensity, pasture management and soil outcomes over time.
Implications for Fashion
A pragmatic path for brands starts with measurement. Breaking methane out from CO₂e and requiring farm and mill suppliers to report it explicitly is one option, although this might prove costly and logistically challenging in a sector which is hardly swimming in money right now.
Brands should be prepared to pay for performance in animal-fibre supply chains by purchasing from producers with independently verified outcomes on methane and land stewardship. Prioritise recycled wool and genuine by-product leather streams to cut virgin demand where quality allows. And when substituting materials, keep the trade-offs honest across toxicity, microfibre release, durability and end-of-life, rather than chasing a single metric. To reiterate, these issues need to be viewed holistically.
We cannot ignore the fact that eliminating animal fibres at scale would likely increase reliance on fossil-derived synthetics or still-immature biomaterials. On the latter, just last week, the most promising leather-substitute start-up to date, Natural Fiber Welding, announced it was winding down operations. Novel, next-generation fibres are nowhere near scaling (despite a shed load of funding) so synthetic fibres will be taking up any slack, in the short, perhaps even long-term.
Finally, and this is a critical point, if the end-goal of reports like CFJ’s is effectively the end of grazing livestock, they should say so plainly so we can all weigh that future with open eyes.
Is this really what any of us want?
