Leather Can Never be Eco-Friendly
Source: https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animals/leather-can-never-be-eco-friendly-sustainability/
Author: Jareb Gleckel
Producing leather from hides isn’t sustainable because raising and slaughtering cows is unsustainable (the chemical waste from making leather in itself is pretty deleterious, but we can set that aside). Imagine what would happen if people stopped buying leather. The leather industry would have you believe that the cows will be killed anyway for meat, and the leather will go to waste. They may also tell you that burying the waste in landfills or incinerating it releases more greenhouse gases, so they’re in fact creating a solution for the waste. The leather industry position statement, in other words, is clever but ultimately sophistry. Imagine an ivory dealer saying, “Poachers don’t kill elephants for ivory, they kill them for meat. We just buy the ivory so that it doesn’t go to waste.”