Why would you call something “plant based” when it uses a lot of plastic which after short time degrades and exposes it to the environment?
I would assume that if polyurethane is marketed as plant based it would actually need to be made from vegetable oils instead of fossil fuels no? Would be false advertising otherwise
Where do you think fossil fuels come from?
As a vegan I avoid this by not using things that look like leather. I prefer cotton and linen clothing.
Yeah, the simplest answer is to just skip the leather look rather than going with a bunch of plastic junk.
If you still want to, I would consider cork and waxed canvas to be reasonable options. Waxed canvas in particular is quite a durable material, so it can be a good choice for bags and jackets.
I had a hard time finding a decent vegan wallet that held up…I had a knockoff Ridge for a while and liked it…eventually my SIL got me a real one for my birthday.
If you don’t carry much cash and just need to carry a few cards and ID, I can’t recommend it enough.
Dress shoes that are vegan and ethical/environmentally sound and hold up and fit my bigass US 14EEEE feet is actually impossible.
I see the point of plant based leather not as necessarily being great now, but as demonstrating that there is demand for R & D to make a product that can meet or surpass the quality of leather later.
as opposed to…dead cow skin?
They don’t live long without skin.
I guess. Dead cow skin uses very little polyurethane
It would be cruel to use the skin of a live cow.
As long as there is meat consumption there will be dead skin. I am open for all kind of alternatives but plastic none for me. Also real leather can be tanned in a bad way. So its a difficult topic in general.
Veg tanning is a thing too, growing in popularity and better for artisanal work.
Not if the meat is grown. But skin could also be grown, I think.
I hadnt thought of that:
good point!
Not that anybody’ll actually do it, but it could be done.
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I thought the point of the stuff was to avoid killing animals.
Yes. Plastic is actually a great material for anything you don’t want to break down.
If you want something that doesn’t break down until you want it to, and then breaks down, you might be asking too much. I’m not even sure animal leather qualifies after the chemical tanning process.
It’s almost as if another common term for vegan leather is PU Leather
Cause they know fools love buzzz words. That’s why I couldn’t find margarine until I realized it’s now “plant butter”
I think everything labeled “plant butter” is vegan, whereas “margarine” can contain both plant and animal fats. I don’t think that’s regulated, but I think that’s how those terms are used in practice. I always check the labels just to be sure, of course.
Polyurethane couldn’t sell the couches because it simply as sexy as plant-based leather.
Just because a movie is “based” on a book doesn’t mean the movie is made of paper.
Checkmate vegetables.
I guess petroleum came from plant.
Not all plant based leather uses plastic. It’s unfortunate that plant+plastic mixes are allowed to call themselves plant based leather.
You’d be shocked what they allow to be called leather. I expect the environmental impact of leather is far worse than the production of vinyl. Tanning is pretty nasty.
“Real” leather (A.K.A. someone else’s skin) is also usually coated in plastic and processed with extremely harmful chromium salts, so it’s usually not any better than the worst leather alternative.
And veg tan? I try not to use chrome tan in stuff I make for both environmental reasons and the fact its a pain to work with but we have been veg tanning for thousands of years.
we’ve (as human) been doing things for thousands of years, which was barely noticeable because there were less than a billion of us until the 1800s, less than 400 million until 1400s and the obvs even less before
My point was more that harmful chemicals in the sense of chromium salts etc. aren’t present in veg tan which, for the most part, is boiling it in a load of tree bark.
oh i completely misunderstood your comment, i didn’t see the “veg” before the tanning, so i thought your were writing about tanning in general
While the conclusion of this argument is valid your premises don’t follow a logical sequence. Firstly, leather is defined as a material obtained from rawhide which is tanned (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather) - this is real leather, there is no need for calls to ignorance here.
Secondly, what do mean by referring to “someone else’s”? Because the common usage for such statements usually mean human, not non-human animals. This essentially looks like an emotional appeal at this point.
Thirdly, you state that it is common for leather to be coated in plastic. While this is technically correct - as large portion of the market is composed of reusing scraps, it dismisses leather production from virgin rawhide and processes using vegetable or synthetic tanning which don’t need plastic for the resultant product.
Herdbeasts are sentient: they are “others”.
They don’t want to be slaughtered: we care more about using meat from their bodies for a momentary meal than we care about their lives-themselves.
That is OUR values.
& our being sociopathic doesn’t make sociopathy universally-right or universally-valid.
( I’m not vegan, but universe has beaten learning into me until I’ve come around to seeing the prejudice in our whole “civilized” “relationship” with reality )
TTBOMK, vegetable-tanning isn’t done as much because it costs more.
& the original person’s comment about chromium-salts looks spot-on, & was ignored by your counter.
Just pointing out some stuff for objectivity, is all: integrity’s a precious-resource, & it takes all of us being loyal to it, to make it remain in our world.
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Herdbeasts are sentient: they are “others”.
you’re using an ambiguous term and insisting everyone is using the same definition as you.
I can definitively agree on the explanation stated infering the second point. However, it is an aspect which needs further clarification, like op said: “someone else’s skin” is usualy interpreted as human directed (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/someone). This essentially introduces double meaning within the argument.
In terms of vegetable tanning your best knowledge is correct, it costs more as it requires substantially more time thats why it is only used for higher end or artisan leather. Additionally, I have stated synthetic tanning which is comparable to vegetable, but not as bad as chromium.
& the original person’s comment about chromium-salts looks spot-on, & was ignored by your counter.
In regards to that, can you provide relevant information which details it?
They don’t want to be slaughtered
there is no proof they know that they, themselves might die. they don’t want to be slaughtered any more than they don’t want to be ceo of beyond meat. they don’t know it’s even a possibility.
Vegan leather is what they call plastic imitation leather nowadays
I recall the term being pleather. Plastic leather.
Technically if they are organic matter compressed over eons into polycarbons, they’re still dinosaurs, so not vegan
Well a lot of it turns out to be dead trees not dinosaurs, but I’m sure I’ll get “um actually” but someone who is a bigger expert
Coal is from trees. Oil is from bacterial mats.
“Well. There it is.”
And it’s fucking terrible compared to real leather. It’ll start flaking or cracking after a year, it’s fucking dangerous around fire, it offers no fucking insulation or protection, it’s shit.
A lot of novice fire performers will grab it thinking it’s the same as real leather, and we always have to pull them aside and give em a talk
Ive had it in my car for 7 years and zero flaking and feels great. Thats definitely specific to the quality you have.
I had a pair of boots that I used 9 months a year in Swedish climate for roughly 10 years without a hitch. They also went for hikes in Costa Rica and across India and Nepal. At the end they looked worn but were still functional as I swapped them out for another pair of vegan leather boots.
I’ve had other vegan shoes that lasted a lot shorter but that can be said about my animal skin shoes as well.
Modern bio-leather causes about 10% off the emissions leather does and doesn’t have the same tanning process which is extremely toxic.
Not saying that vegan is strictly better, but rumours of it’s crappiness are severely out of date.
I definitely haven’t had the same experience. Anything I get that is pleather ends up breaking down sooner rather than later (especially thrifted pleather). Hell, my favorite pair of pleather pants recently lost a dish sized area by the crotch, and those were bought new from a brand I trust. Virtually every pair of pleather boots has ended up in the trash, and I currently have a long pleather skirt that basically ripped from floor to waist that I’m still deciding whether to fix or not.
I will add the disclaimer that I’m an experienced leatherworker which affects my bias
I rarely get real leather new, and when it fails it’s rarely the actual leather. I have a jacket I thrifted about a decade ago that is still going strong, though I’ve had to replace the buttons a few times. My most recent leather boots survived multiple camping trips and heavy use, until the plastic zipper broke. Even my leatherwork mainly uses repurposed scraps. At this point my partner and I refuse to buy/use a daily purse that is anything but leather because of how long it lasts. It’s worth repairing leather, it’s not worth repairing pleather.
Plastic zipper on leather boots is quite the engineering choice…
In fairness it’s strong plastic, but I wish they’d used metal. Curse you Timberland!
YSK: Cellulose can be made extremely durable and water resistent. The wallet I’ve been using for a decade now is made of cellulose. The stitching was kinda bad from the start, so I’ve had to repair it once. But the material itself is still holding stong. And it feels nice and is very grippy.
“TreeLeather” or something like that, was 1 brand of the cellulose “leather” stuff…
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I don’t really understand all the hate/cynicism towards vegan leather. Like yeah obviously plastic is bad for the environment, but raising cows and dumping thousands of tons of chromium into rural waterways for the tanning process aren’t good either. Leather is actually far worse for the environment by some metrics.
Plus there’s the fact that most leather is sealed with plastic/acrylic to increase its longevity anyway, unless you’re buying something wicked expensive.
Plastic is just as bad for the environment, not to mention people’s health, as those cows.
You clearly haven’t chugged chromium water
Chromium-based tanning is only 1 kind of tanning, but yeah, chromium’s one of those chemicals which needs to be limited more-carefully, among our ecologies.
Vegetable-based tanning also exists, & I’m no expert, so there could be multiple way I don’t know about.
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It must be pretty hard to understand if you don’t think about it too hard.
Leather can last for many decades if treated well. Vegan leather aka plastic lasts a few years tops.
Look up where plastic comes from.
Trees
Oil doesn’t come from wood, right?
correct, iirc it’s from absurd quantities of cyanobacteria in the oceans around when life got started.
Trees turned into coal, specifically trees from before fungi had evolved to decompose the wood, so it was able to just accumulate.
+ millions of years
