The Myth Hunter #3: The Truth About Vegan Leather
Here are some facts you should take into consideration when buying vegan leather
There are numerous reasons for opting for vegan instead of animal leather. Many people simply don’t want to wear actual animal skin and live knowing a living being had to die for their leisure. Some might argue that leather is a good material for the fashion industry since the skin is often a co-product of the meat industry and would otherwise be thrown away. That’s a fair point, but the meat industry is a tremendous problem for the environment itself. Making surplus skins into leather instead of throwing them away isn’t quite environmentally friendly as it might sound.
Until the 20th century, animal skins were air- or salt-dried and tanned with vegetable tannins or oil. Today, the process of turning skin into durable leather suitable for the luxury industry is far more harmful to the environment. The skins are bathed in formaldehyde, coal-tar derivatives, mineral salts, various oils, dyes, and finishes, some of which are cyanide- and chrome-based. These substances are harmful to people who work with them, they make the previously biodegradable skin into a non-biodegradable one, and eventually, as Tansy Hosking wrote in her book Stitched Up, they end up in our rivers and pollute our drinking water.
Vegan leather, on the other hand, isn’t always a more sustainable choice. When you say something is vegan, people will often think it’s also environmentally friendly because vegans love nature and animals and don’t consume anything of animal origin. That might be true, but it doesn’t make vegan leather automatically environmentally friendly. Vegan leather does not harm animals, and that’s a good thing. However, it is usually made of a polyester base with a PVC or polyurethane coating. These are manufactured from fossil fuels and take a long time to break down - hundreds of years. Besides being dependent on petrochemicals, making PVC or polyurethane leather is also incredibly harmful to the environment. Polyurethane is submerged into a toxic solvent to make it fluid enough to be painted onto a fabric backing. And since it’s derived from fossil fuels, polyurethane releases ash, nitrogen, and carbon into the atmosphere, which pollutes the air and contributes to acid rain.
There are many plant-based alternatives to vegan leather out there. But you have to be careful with those, too. (I hear you, this sustainability business is a hard nut.) There is Mylo, a vegan leather made from mushrooms’ underground structures developed by Bolt Threads. You’ve probably already heard of Piñatex, a vegan leather made from pineapple leaves in Spain by Ananas Anam that even H&M used in their ‘sustainable’ collections. A company in Bolzano, Italy, called Frumat, makes leather from apple skins. There is Desserto, a new vegan leather developed in Mexico, made from the nopal cactus. There is Vegea, which is a grape leather invented by Pangaia. And there are many more to come, I’m sure.
The problem is that these are far from being bio-degradable even though they are, by some degree, plant-based. All of these, no exception, mix plants with polyurethane. Most use water-based polyurethane, which is the eco-friendliest option you can use, but their product is still harmful to the environment once it’s disposed of at the end of its life span. At this point, I personally choose genuine leather, made from skin that was a by-product of the meat industry and is vegetable-tanned, over vegan leather. And once the vegetable leathers are at a point where they can be both durable and 100% bio-based and bio-degradable, I’m sure I’ll turn to them. Wearing the thing I own for as much as possible and knowing it won’t farm the environment once I’m done with it is a priority for me. That doesn’t mean it’s a priority for you, but I hope I have given you enough facts to make an informed decision the next time you’re buying (vegan) leather.
A quick update on the sales at Najs Buvljak. I managed to raise just over 200€, which is somewhat below the number I had hoped for. But still, I think it’s great since it was my first time doing something like this. I rounded it up to 300€ and donated it to Fashion Revolution. Fashion Revolution Week is going on right now, and you can join, too. Check the details on their website and Instagram.