Leather is not an innocent byproduct of the meat industry

Your leather purse might put out as much carbon as 35 hamburgers. But the alternative doesn’t have to be junky pleather!

The climate case against beef is now almost boringly well-established: It is, by far, the most carbon-intensive food in the world, amounting to about 6 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. But cows don’t just become burgers and steaks. They also become shoes, bags, couches, and car interiors — products often marketed with a very different story about sustainability.

Leather has often been defended in the fashion industry as an essentially harmless by-product of meat production — a waste material that would otherwise be thrown in the trash. But if you think about it, that assumption is kind of weird: The global leather market is valued at hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and hides are an important revenue stream for cattle producers. We wouldn’t say that paper is a waste product of timber production just because the most valuable parts of the tree are used for lumber. Likewise, animal hides help support extra profits for cattle farming and also carry a share of that industry’s emissions and other planetary impacts.

A recent meta-analysis published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering reveals that cow leather’s carbon footprint is much larger than we thought: 70 percent larger than previous estimates. Using the study’s emissions estimate, Vox calculated that a men’s leather wallet would carry the emissions equivalent of roughly four American-made beef burgers; a leather tote bag, meanwhile, might be comparable to roughly 35 burgers.

Pound for pound, the researchers estimate, bovine leather emits more than 12 times as much as vegan leathers made from materials ranging from synthetics like polyurethane — mass-market pleather — to next-generation fungi- and plant cellulose-based leathers.

Mikaila Roncevich, the study’s lead author and a graduate student in the department of fiber science and apparel design at Cornell University, cautioned me that there’s still some uncertainty in the precise numbers due to gaps in the data on global cattle and leather supply chains. But the core insight of the paper for consumers remains the same. “If [leather’s] footprint is shocking or seems high to people, I think it should be a push to keep reflecting on the impact of raising animals for products,” Roncevich said. Leather may benefit (along with wool and other animal-derived materials) from a natural image, but on closer examination, it helps sustain one of the world’s most polluting, environmentally destructive industries.

Why leather’s carbon footprint has been so underestimated

The climate impact of beef and other foods has been relatively well documented — and covered exhaustively in outlets like this one — thanks in part to a landmark 2018 paper that consolidated and........

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