Throughout the the past 20 years the interest in sustainability and ethicality has risen immensely, especially in regards to fashion, as the reality of the climate crisis and human impact begins to way more and more heavily on everyone’s minds we are forced every day to make choices about how we respect our environment, animals, and the world through our purchases.
One of the many ways that people often choose to make a “sustainable” choice is to substitute genuine leather for “vegan leather”, but is the vegan alternative really better for the environment? Absolutely not.
Vegan leather, often called “pleather” or plastic leather is just that, plastic. More specifically “vegan leather is… made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or polyurethane. Both of these materials are made from fossil fuels” Jasmine Mayhead with Ethical Made Easy said. Fossil fuel based plastics like PVC can take hundreds and thousands of years to fully break down once they have been discarded, unlike real leather which only takes approximately fifty years to break down as it is a natural material.
It’s also important to note that those who make the choice to use vegan leather will be forced to discard it much more often then they would genuine leather.
“Vegan leather is often a lot thinner than real leather and much lighter weight which… makes it less durable than real leather. A real, good quality leather can last decades when cared for, whereas you might only get a year or so out of a pair of shoes made from good quality [vegan] leather” Camilla Shep with Mahi Leather said. Meaning that even if you’re able to commit to getting every bit of use out of your vegan leather items before discarding them, it’s more than likely you’ll be forced to replace them many times throughout your life.
Many argue that the reason to avoid real leather is to protect the cows that the leather is harvested from, but in reality harvesting leather is much more sustainable than may initially be apparent, especially if you consume beef products, as “leather is usually a co-product of the meat industry. This means animals are not [killed] solely for their hide, but the hide is a bi-product” Mayhead said. So unless you have a moral opposition to the consumption of beef, the usage of leather is actually making more use of the animal, and avoiding unnecessary waste from the production of beef.
While leather is a bi-product, making use of the leftovers from the harvesting of beef, vegan leather is not a bi-product, and its production is often harmful to the environment. “The process of producing [vegan] leather often involves the use of solvents and other chemicals…These chemicals can be released into the air and water, contributing to air pollution and water contamination” Manuel Dreesmann said.
Throughout every step of production and ownership vegan leather is less sustainable for the environment than genuine leather, not only will it require dangerous chemicals to be produced that could possibly find their way into the air and water, but it requires that you buy it more often due to its lack of durability, and when these fossil fuel plastics end up breaking they will sit in landfills for hundreds of years, where as real leather comes as a byproduct of the beef industry, one of the largest industries in the US, and will last a lifetime, and take only around 50 years to decompose. Without a doubt genuine leather is more sustainable for our environment then it’s synthetic alternatives.
