Anti-deforestation Regulation: UNIC’s alarm  

UNIC – Italian Tanneries and FILCTEM CGIL, FEMCA CISL and UILTEC UIL raise the alarm on the present and future of the national leather supply chain. What is worrying the Italian tanning sector which is already “experiencing an extremely complicated and very negative economic phase” are the consequences of the entry into force at the end of the year of the EU anti-deforestation Regulation n.1115/2023 (EUDR). “This regulation – we read in the official press release – sets objectives that Italian tanners fully share, to the point that for years the national tanning industry has been strategically committed to improving supply chain traceability and combating any possible phenomenon of deforestation”. The current formulation of EUDR, however, provides that operators who market bovine hides in the European Union must verify their origin from non-deforested areas, requiring the application of traceability tools which are currently absolutely inadequate, if not unavailable, and unsuitable. to satisfy, in a very short time, unnecessarily severe and stringent requirements. Tanners fear that the application of the anti-deforestation Regulation would cause a lot of damage to the sector “making its circular activity of recovery and transformation of raw hides substantially impracticable, and frustrating its own purposes, since it would not contribute in the slightest to the real fight against deforestation, to at the same time favoring competitive dumping by non-European countries”.
Together with the trade unions, the Italian tanners’ association therefore asks the national and EU institutions for “an urgent intervention to avert the unnecessarily devastating impact of the EUDR on the Italian leather industry, in order to avoid heavy repercussions on employment levels in the sector and to support the recovery of a virtuous economic system that is at the forefront on the international scene, which uses animal hides and skins from zootechnical processing, implementing the principles of the circular economy, and also carries out waste treatment and recovery cycles for an effective and efficient use of existing resources”.