Life Cycle Assessment of Leather Manufacturing in Bangladesh: Environmental Footprints, Hotspots, and Decarbonization Pathways

Leather industry is one of the major contributors in global economy but also responsible for its massive solid waste generation, water pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Therefore, it is essential to investigate the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of leather value chain for its sustainability and compliance with national and international rules and regulations. This study presents a gate-to-gate LCA of leather production, based on primary data from ten export-oriented representative tanneries in Bangladesh, which account for approximately 10.6% of Bangladesh's total annual export. The selected tanneries are well organized, two are gold certified by leather working group (LWG), and others are preparing for LWG certification. The system boundary covered energy, water, and chemicals consumption with transportation, and waste generation scenario, focusing on core leather processing from raw hides to finished leather. As a gate-to-gate assessment, this study excludes upstream livestock production and downstream product use and end-of-life stages due to avoid complexity and significant uncertainty. The study dedicatedly focused on core leather manufacturing processes since the sustainability of leather processing is a serious concern. Environmental impacts were evaluated using the ReCiPe 2016 midpoint method in SimaPro software and ecoinvent 3 database. Results show that average energy consumption to produce finished leather from raw hides is about 26.87 MJ/m 2 . Average water intensity is 271.69 L/m 2 , and overall GHG emissions for chromium and combined tanning process are estimated at 17.47 kg CO 2 -eq per m 2 of finished leather, which is higher than the European context and international benchmarks (12–15.79 kg CO 2 -eq/m 2 ). However, chrome-free tanning process has resulted in savings of approximately 5% GHG emissions, with values of 16.58 kg CO 2 -eq per m 2 of finished leather. Chemical inputs, energy, and water use are identified as the main environmental hotspots, with re-tanning chemicals contributing mostly to GHG emissions, while beamhouse chemicals and chrome have the highest toxicity impacts. Road logistics contributes more in transportation section because it largely depends on diesel-based vehicles. In addition to GHG emissions, chemicals used in the production process, such as re-tanning chemicals and chrome tanning, also emerged as the primary drivers for other environmental impact categories including Freshwater eutrophication (41.5×10 -4 kg P-eq.), Human Carcinogenic Toxicity (229.86 kg 1,4-DCB-eq), and Terrestrial Ecotoxicity (69.82 kg 1,4-DCB-eq). The findings highlight the need for integrated sustainability approaches, especially the decarbonization strategies, including energy-efficient systems, renewable energy, water recycling, and chemical reduction, to lower environmental burdens and enhance the global competitiveness of the Bangladesh leather sector.