A new initiative that the European Commission calls its Clean Industrial Deal should strengthen the leather sector’s claims that it deserves to remain part of the manufacturing panorama.
Following elections in 2024, the European Union began 2025 with a new team of commissioners to lead its executive arm. The new faces around the table have a new programme to pursue. This includes the Competitiveness Compass, a roadmap of policies aimed at making the European Union (EU) more competitive on the global stage.
Over the last two decades, the Commission has said, Europe has not kept pace with other major economies owing to “a persistent gap in productivity growth”. But it insists that the 27-state EU has what it takes to reverse this trend with its “talented and educated workforce and unique social infrastructure”. It accepts that it is necessary to act urgently to tackle the barriers and structural weaknesses that hold it back. It wants Europe to become the place where clean products are invented, manufactured and brought to market, all while becoming climate neutral.
Urgent actions outlined in the Competitiveness Compass include a new ‘Clean Industrial Deal’, which is launching now, in the first quarter of 2025. Something else that will launch this quarter is a ‘Union of Skills’. Further along, there will be a new Circular Economy Act for the EU, a joint purchasing programme for critical raw materials, a dedicated package for the chemicals sector and a water-resilience strategy. Leather manufacturers may not be top-of-mind for EU commissioners when they talk about these ideas, but tanners and finished leather product companies can make themselves part of all these stories.
New dynamism
In statements so far, the Commission has presented the Clean Industrial Deal as a means of creating “a new dynamism for Europe’s industrial structure”, leading, it hopes, to new, clean trade and investment partnerships. These will build on the trade agreements the EU already has in place with more than 70 countries and territories.
What the Union of Skills will seek to deliver is the reskilling and upskilling of workers in Europe, especially to help them adapt to digitalisation and new technology, including artificial intelligence. This is in an effort to make sure there continue to be “quality jobs” in the manufacturing sector in Europe. It insists that the entire initiative is aimed at confirming the EU as an attractive location for manufacturing and new, circular business models.
Economic imperative
The leading voice for the Clean Industrial Deal and for what the European Commission is calling “a clean, just and competitive transition” will be one of its vice-presidents, Teresa Ribera. She makes it clear that industry has a fundamental role to play in bringing this transition about. “We cannot compete without manufacturing capacity or a reliable supply of raw materials,” Ms Ribera says. “We will remain competitive if we close the innovation gap. If we are to succeed in closing this gap, a consistent development of circular-economy practices and efficient use of existing resources are important.”
She acknowledges that one of the biggest challenges facing manufacturers in Europe is higher costs than the ones competitors in other parts of the world face. “Competing in global markets is challenging when basic inputs like energy or raw materials, essential to every aspect of our economy, are significantly more expensive,” she says. This February, Reuters reported that European industries face energy prices that are up to three times higher than the prices their competitors in the US, for example, have to pay.
Ms Ribera goes on to make clear that, in addition to finding the best possible way to source new raw materials, using existing raw materials efficiently must also be part of the Clean Industrial Deal. She implies that there should be no need for a debate about this as it is a good way to promote circularity. “There may be people who take this as an environmental imperative,” she adds, “but in fact it is mainly an economic one.”
Antwerp answered
A year ago, the leather industry’s main representative body in the European Union, COTANCE, was one of the organisations that signed an official document, the Antwerp Declaration, calling for the European Union to set up a new industrial deal for Europe, to work in parallel with the 2020 European Green Deal. Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has already made it clear this year that the European Union will “stay the course on the Green Deal objectives, without any question”.
The Antwerp Declaration calls on the European Commission to commit to making sure industrial production will remain part of its broader strategy. This includes a call to increase raw materials security in the EU and to boost demand for circular products. COTANCE says it was proud to align itself with more than 200 business organisations in supporting the declaration. It describes this as a way of reaffirming its dedication to “a more competitive, innovative and greener landscape for the leather industry, and for European manufacturing as a whole”. From the new Clean Industrial Deal, it seems the European Commission may have listened and taken this call on board.
Some commentators outside the leather industry will assume that recovering hides and skins from meat and milk companies and turning them into beautiful, long-lasting, versatile, high-performance, value-adding, circular materials cannot be part of a clean transition or of a clean manufacturing future. We know this assumption is incorrect. What could undermine more egregiously the call to use existing raw materials well than allowing millions of EU hides to go to waste rather than to tanners? We also know it is essential to keep repeating the message that any new industrial strategy in the EU can, and should, include old industries, too, provided they can claim with justification that they are clean and green.
Clean manufacturing will confirm the EU as an attractive location for manufacturing and new circular business models.
Credit: International leather goods fair, Offenbach
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