Your leather purse might put out as much carbon as 35 hamburgers. But the alternative doesn’t have to be junky pleather!
  • noodles@slrpnk.net
    3 days

    Article touched on this but with no depth or insights at all, but leather is a much more durable good than food. They equate a leather wallet as having the carbon impact of four burgers; I’ll accept that uncritically for the moment, but four burgers will sustain me for maybe 2 days, whereas my leather wallet has lasted over 10 years of daily use. Maybe that doesn’t matter from an overall emissions standpoint, if the leather industry produces 8% of the emissions of the meat industry, but I think it does bear out that replacing beef in my diet will have a far greater impact than replacing leather just by volume of consumption.

    They also show that leather alternatives have a lower carbon cost of manufacture, which I’ll also buy, but what matters for durable goods is lifetime cost, which is only vaguely alluded to without citations. Annectodally I’m still wearing a leather bomber jacket my father bought at a thrift store when he was young, whereas a pleather jacket from a nice brand fell apart after less than 10 years of less frequent wearing. That means the leather would have to be more than 5x more damaging to be a worse climate decision, which their chart doesn’t appear to show, though again it’s all fairly wishy-washy.

    • Cypher@aussie.zone
      3 days

      They also fail to account for uses where leather is simply the best material available for safety such as for motorcycle gear.

      There is no replacement for real leather in terms of rider safety.

      Also my leather wallet is 13 years old and looks nearly new!

  • belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org
    3 days

    What gets me is folks choosing pleather when thats made of oil and is also terrible for the environment and wont bio degrade like leather, and also wont last regular use. Shit falls apart and becomes fast fashion but leather can be taken care of and lasts for decades.

  • Gladaed@feddit.org
    3 days

    A cowhide is worth about a percent or so of the value of the meat.

    Yes, it’s an enormous industry and processing at scale is harmful. And leather requires chemicals. But reducing consumption of meat automagically makes leather less available. And don’t use leather from cows raised for bougie leather.