Vegan Plant-Based Leather

I have explored kombucha based leather's here in these three blog-posts. These three blog-posts do not however cover the full exciting field and innovations made in the recent few years in plant-based leathers. In particular, there is an Indian based company, Phool, that has created and incense line as well as fully compostable plant-leather from a waste stream, flowers clogging the Ganges River(linked is a BBC article on their project). Their material, Fleather, won the coveted 2022 Earthshot prize and is made by growing mushrooms on this waste flower stream. The exciting part of this project, is waste flowers are a common waste stream generated by local Hindu temples as well as the average Hindu family. Hindus use flowers regularly in their daily worship. Not only does traditional leather production use water, energy, and generate waste effluents such as phenols and sulphides, but raising cattle is one of the most greenhouse generating activities."Global livestock production contributes an estimated 18% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions mainly in terms of methane and nitrous oxide." US livestock play a surprisingly large role in green house emissions. In the Us alone they are responsible for " about 35% of anthropogenic methane emissions" and " cow methane is 34 times bigger" a problem "than the greenhouse gas effect of carbon dioxide". One of the particularly exciting things about Fleather, unlike other vegetables leather products, Fleather is fully compostable and includes no plastic.

There are some other exciting vegan leather options. The majority of vegan leather, is however made from polyurethane. Unfortunately "Landfilling is still the most common way to process polyurethane waste". Vegan Leather has also been made from Bamboo leaves(banbu an 83% plant, 250 composting lamb-skin like plant leather), cactus (Desserto a cactus based vegan leather that is 90% plant , partially biodegradable and results in 20% water savings )pineapple leaves(Pinatex: 90% plant based, and partially biodegradable), cork(100% organic, and composts at the same speed as materials such as wood), apple peels(50% plant based and non-compostable), other fruit waste(Vega: grapes,banana stems ), mushrooms(MuSkin, Milo). One particularly exciting fact of Fleather is it is entirely plant based and fully compostable.