The luxurious leather covering the seats in vehicles around the world is not only comfortable but sustainable. The value chain begins with cattle raised to provide beef for the food industry. As a by-product, hides are upcycled for leather manufacturing and diverted from landfills.
Lear Eagle Ottawa hand selects premium hides from suppliers in Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, the United States and Uruguay. Seventy percent of our raw hides originate in Brazil where 100% of our suppliers use geo-fencing to ensure they don’t buy animals from farms involved with deforestation, invasion of indigenous and protected areas, enslaved work and/or rural conflicts.
Sourced from a 96% Leather Working Group (LWG) certified supply base and assessed annually by the Business Benchmark on Farm Animal Welfare (BBFAW), our supply chain follows recognized animal welfare guidelines to provide comfortable living conditions, nutritious food, clean water and low stress environments for cattle. Our goal is to ensure that 100% of our leather supply chain is LWG certified by 2022. We have established a non-compliance hotline to report and investigate human rights and animal welfare concerns.
Lear’s supply chain logs incoming raw materials, tracing hides back to the groups of processing centers, feed yards or ranches where the animals were raised. Regular audits and deeper annual assessments are conducted at our direct suppliers’ facilities, including traceability audits from third-party auditors such as LWG, which also monitor environmental compliance and performance. In addition, the food industry adopted BBFAW rating criteria to evaluate farms’ animal management policy commitment and performance.
Looking Ahead
Lear is increasing our focus on risks in our supply chain to ensure risks deep in our value chain are understood and addressed. We have a solid foundation and are moving toward even more verification, engagement and monitoring.