Vegan Leather Part 2

Vegan Leather Pt. 2: Mushroom

We recently posted about a renewable, cruelty-free alternative to animal leather made from the pineapple plant, Piñatex; here we introduce a second alternative: 

Vegan Leather Part 1

Vegan Leather Pt. 1: Pineapple.

Could the Pineapple plant really offer a viable alternative to animal leather?

The fur industry has had a long history of conflict with animal rights groups due to their methods of production, but leather hasn't received quite the same level of attention. We know fur comes from skinning animals, but so does leather. It doesn't take much to understand why neither of these products can be produced humanely; a quick Google search can provide more gruesome details than one would like to know (I won't post them here).

What if there were an alternative material? One that provided the same or similar quality and texture without the suffering of animals and factory workers alike?

The Impact of the Bovine Industry -- Part 1

You may be wondering what Bovine is? Bovine is leather that is made from cow hide. Cows are the largest population and easiest to maintain source animals, making them the most abundant and common leather source. Cowhide, although being one of the heaviest and toughest leathers, is the most inexpensive due to its high availability and resistance to dirt and water. 65% of all leather products produced around the world are made from Bovine but how does it get made and at what costs (not talking financially here) (Hoekstra & Chapagain, 2008)? In this mini-series we will be following the production of Bovine leather from cow to the making of a Coach purse through the eyes of the virtual water and chemicals used in the process. By the end, we will have gained a vast amount of knowledge of where some of our favorite accessories come from and what we can do to help mitigate the environmental impact.

                Hide is a byproduct of the food production from the source animal, in this case a cow or calf. Let us first look at what it takes to raise this cow to get it to the proper age and weight to begin this process. It takes three years for a cow to grow to the proper size and weight before it can be slaughtered, this is where we get the hide from. Over the course of these three years the cow will consume roughly 1,300 kilograms of grains (wheat, oats, barley or corn) and 7,200 kilograms of roughages (pasture, dry hay or silage). The production of all these grains and roughages requires roughly 3,060,000 liters of water. The cow will drink almost 24,000 liters of water as well. Finally, approximately 7,000 liters of water will be used in servicing the farmhouse and for the slaughtering process. So far this is a total of 3,091,000 liters of water to produce roughly 537 kg cow itself or about 7,756 liters per kilogram (Hoekstra & Chapagain, 2008). This is where the tradeoff of the weight of the hide in proportion to the weight of the cow comes in.

The amount of “green”, unprocessed, hide that comes from a cow is roughly 10% of the weight of the cow itself (Hoekstra & Chapagain, 2008). Let us use the weight of the example cow above to figure out how much green hide will come from this cow.

(537 kg)/cow  × .10=53.7  kg⁄cow

                53.7 kg of green hide comes from our example cow. Tune in next time to learn how leather is tanned and the harm that can occur to the environment from this process.

Sources Used:

Hoekstra, A. Y., & Chapagain, A. K. (2008). Globalization of Water: Sharing the Planet's Freshwater Resources. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

The Best Things Take Time

The Best Things Take Time

The video above outlines a local tannery here in Oregon that has insisted on using old fashioned methods since their establishment in 1863. This process is called vegetable tanning and uses natural chemical compounds called tannins in place of the environmentally hazardous chromium salts. Muir and McDonald Tannery's primary product is steer leather-- which is used in the manufacturing of saddles. The company only produces about 60 hides a week due to the time that it takes to complete the natural tanning process. This is compared to commercial tanneries that have outputs near 50,000 hides a week. But there are several advantages to waiting the long 10 weeks:

1.     Use of natural products – This means that there are no harsh synthetic compounds, no potentially cancer-causing dyes or other artificial substances added. What you get are the deep, rich hues created by Mother Nature herself in the great outdoors.  And when you smell it, it smells like leather—not a chemical factory.

2.     Benefits of aging – Artificial tanning methods can cause leather to fade, crack, or even bleed after a short period of time, staining your garments and making frequent replacement or treatment necessary.  On the other hand, vegetable tanning is a gentle method that adds a lustrous patina to leather, and produces a soft and supple product that does not crack or harden.

3.     Truly unique characteristics – Some things, like aircraft wings or car keys, should come off the assembly line as close to the design specs as possible.  Others, however, suffer when subjected to such a one-size-fits-all approach.  Leather goods fall into this latter category. Impersonal tanning methods used in giant factories turn out millions of items in rapid succession, each of which is virtually identical to every other one.  But no two vegetable-tanned products are exactly alike.  There will always be some subtle variation in hue or tone that makes it truly one-of-a-kind.  This allows its owner to say that they have something no one else on earth has.

4.     Environmentally friendly practices – Modern industrial leather tanning methods uses highly toxic compounds that poison the earth and pollute streams and oceans. What makes this worse is that these methods are most commonly used in nations with few (if any) laws in place to protect the environment.  When these noxious chemicals are dumped on the ground or into water sources, they kill fish and wildlife, fill the atmosphere with deadly fumes, and eventually find their way to the air you breathe, the streams you fish in or drink from, and the creeks or swimming pools in which your children play. [S. Texas Saddlery]

To learn more about toxic tannery practices, alternatives like vegetable tanning, and more about the global leather industry's effect click to visit our site EcoPol: Leather

China: Water, Water... Nowhere. And Less than 23% to Drink.

Sowing the seeds of awareness and alerting others to the damage caused by the leather industry is the first, and arguably, one of the most vital steps in halting the deluge of harmful effects that stream from leather producers that neglect to engage in even the most basic environmental protection and employee safety protocols. After all, those of us here at the EcoPol project have made this our mission for the Fall 2013 term. However, in attempting to rally others to the cause­, in effort to prevent the problem from appearing too vast, too amorphous, and too unsolvable, I find myself wanting to fixate upon one example as an illustration of the illnesses present within the light leather manufacturing field and I begin to come down with environmental myopia. For myself, that myopia leads me to focus on the now notorious tannery districts of Harzaribargh. Sure, these tanneries are a perfect example of the problems present within the leather industry, but they are also an example of an example that all too easily becomes the only instance of environmental damage caused by the leather industry that we see. However, although the images and stories  that seep from that tainted tannery district like so much effluvium are indeed useful tools in utilizing real world events to instill an emotional resonance in our reader, it is imperative that this single example remain just that- a single example among myriad more. But if we fixate too ferociously or too frequently upon one, then all of the interconnected environmental issues woven together can be too easily overlooked, and the bigger consequences to which these cascading environmental issues may lead may approach without us ever noticing.

To find another instance in which the leather industry is generating massive profits by failing to prevent the generation of massive amounts of pollution, we need only look to the nation that leads the pack in leather production. China has steadily produced over 2,000,000,000 square feet of bovine light leather each year since 2001 and in the first nine months of 2013 alone completed the export of 60.2 billion USD worth of leather, at an increase of 8.6% more leather exported than during the same period in 2012. There's no question that year by year, China tans more hides than any other nation, but as we have all seen, the process of tanning leather leaves behind byproducts and pollutants that threaten the environment and any life that comes into contact with them. This is cause for concern when we consider that China is producing such large amounts of leather, and has historically been known for large numbers of leather producers that ignore environmental regulations and restrictions in favor of cheap labor and low manufacturing costs. Although organizations like the China Leather Industry association (CLIA) have partnered with environmentally-focused NGOs, the Chinese Federal Government, and the International Leather Working Group, industrial pollution from processes such as leather tanning have already created an immense pollution problem in China, a nation with a population that is disproportionately high when compared to its water resources. To further imbalance this already top heavy ratio, in 2009 alone, the Chinese leather industry was responsible for discharging more than of 249,000,000 cubic meters of waste water.

The ripple effects caused by this water pollution are where we see how crucial it is to never become myopically fixated upon a single instance of a greater problem, because it is in China's water where the interconnected nature of these aforementioned environmental issues become evident. This water pollution by the Chinese leather industry is depleting the already low levels of usable and potable water that China has. China's population comprises 20% of the world's people, and yet only has access to 7% of the world's freshwater supply. Furthermore, of that 7%, the vast majority of China's freshwater is so polluted that it's unfit for consumption; 77% of key lakes and reservoirs, 50% of city groundwater, and 43% of major river basins are all non-potable. The chromium pollution from the effluents of China's leather industry and the negative health effects that it poses is bad enough, but when viewed in the greater context of China's water crisis, this ties the leather industry to deteriorating global water-nomics. As China Water Risk, a non-profit organization dedicated to the study and abatement of China's water Crisis points out, this water crisis not only effects the other nations dependent upon China for water by decreasing the supply of freshwater while the demand continues to increase, but can also have long-lasting and far reaching impacts upon power, trade, and can lead to civil unrest and even out-and-out warfare between nations for control of the water supply.

China's leather industry's continued growth and its immense fiscal profits come at a cost of more than just the lives lost and health being ruined right now by the current conditions around the areas tainted by the chemicals used for tanning. In the example of China's leather industry, we see how far-reaching the environmental issues of leather production are, and how many other future disasters,  whether caused by man-made conflicts for control of natural resources or pollution-based blowback from decades of disregard for how delicately interwoven are the elements of our environment.