Is your luxury handbag destroying the rainforest?

A report is claiming that fashion brands are buying leather for products, like luxury handbags, with links to illegal cattle ranches implicated in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest.

Environmental organisation Earthsight has carried out an investigation using court rulings, satellite imagery, shipment records, and undercover operations, which suggests that US fashion house Coach has bought leather from "a giant Brazilian slaughterhouse with a record of buying thousands of cattle raised on illegally deforested land."

The report comes as consumers are increasingly seeking out products that come from sustainable and environmentally friendly sources, and as manufacturers are under greater pressure to ramp up the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) credentials of their brands.

Earthsight notes that its report should be particularly embarrassing for Coach, which has "refocused its marketing on Gen Z, an unusually selective and environmentally conscious consumer segment."

According to the pressure group, nearly all recent deforestation of the Amazon in Brazil is driven by cattle ranching, with the state of Pará the area the worst affected.

It has calculated that almost all the leather exported from Pará to Europe goes to Italy, including hides from the suspect slaughterhouse, and a sizeable chunk of those exports go to two tanneries in the Veneto region – Conceria Cristina and Faeda – where it is processed and rebranded as Italian leather.

"Earthsight undercover investigators were told by a Conceria Cristina representative that a regular buyer of their Brazilian leather is Coach," it said, while other buyers from the two tanneries include Chanel, Chloé, Hugo Boss, LVMH's brands Fendi and Louis Vuitton, as well as Kering Group labels Balenciaga, Gucci, and Saint Laurent.

"Consumers of luxury products expect the high-price tags to offer some assurances that they are not contributing to deforestation or the theft of Indigenous lands," said Earthsight’s Latin America team lead, Rafael Pieroni.

"This investigation shows that this trust is misplaced," he added. "Until fashion brands begin carrying out meaningful due diligence on their own supply chains, they cannot guarantee their products are free of these harms."

In Europe, legislation that will require companies to prove that leather and other commodities they use are deforestation-free is due to come into effect by December 30 of this year after a delay that has been linked to corporate lobbying.

The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) covers materials used by a wide range of industrial sectors, namely wood and wood products, cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber and soy. Once in force, companies will have to meet a series of obligations, including recording geolocation data of the area of production and ensuring traceability of products to the plot of land – with no exceptions – and with due diligence statements submitted to a centralised EU information system.