Vegan Leather Has Been Promising to Save the Planet for a Decade. The Cows Have Not Noticed.

For over a decade now, sustainable fashion has greeted each new vegan leather with the breathless enthusiasm of a labradoodle spotting a tennis ball. Mushroom leather! Cactus leather! Pineapple leather! All the look and feel of the real thing, minus the methane, deforestation, chemical pollution and pesky animal welfare concerns. The future, apparently, was arriving any day now.

It was not. While these next-gen materials have hoovered up billions of dollars in capital under an environmental banner, experts worry they remain a shiny distraction while the fashion industry's emissions and its reliance on fossil fuel-derived materials keep growing. "Apple leather, orange leather, pineapple leather, fruit salad leather," says Dr Helen Crowley, founder of Nature Matters, who spent a decade leading nature and sustainable sourcing for luxury conglomerate Kering. "It's like, seriously, do we really have to call it leather? I haven't yet seen an alternative leather become an alternative. I've seen it just added to the portfolio. It's about more variety and more stories to sell more stuff."

And sell more stuff is precisely what the industry has done - of actual leather. According to Textile Exchange, global production of raw hides used in traditional leather, a co-product of the meat industry, climbed steadily over the last two decades, from 10.5m tonnes in 2005 to 13.8m tonnes in 2024. So after all that time, money and endless campaigns by animal rights activists, alternatives to leather have failed to slow demand for leather. Approximately half of all leather goes into footwear, 5 to 10% into apparel, 10 to 15% into home textiles, with the remainder spread across leather goods like bags and wallets, and the automotive industry.

Advancements in vegan leathers are further complicated by commercial viability and the awkward question of whether they are actually better for the environment, given that most rely on some amount of plastic. In the last few years, three of the most prominent leather alternatives stopped being produced entirely: Mylo, made by Bolt Threads from mushroom mycelium; Piñatex, made by Ananas Anam from pineapple leaves; and Mirum, made by Natural Fiber Welding (NFW) from cork. A fourth, MycoWorks, which makes a lab-grown mushroom leather called Reishi, narrowly escaped insolvency last year.

Investors poured over $1bn into these companies, but even that eye-watering sum couldn't overcome the barriers that continue to plague material innovators: price parity, brand adoption beyond capsule collections, questions over performance, and reliance on binders and coatings made using fossil fuels. Shoes, bags and wallets made from plant-based and lab-grown materials remain rare. Guardian Australia contacted over a dozen innovators producing plant-based or lab-grown leathers, and only four - Desserto, which uses cacti; Innovera from Modern Meadow, which uses plant-based proteins; Nutico, which uses cocoa and walnut waste; and Pliant, made from bio-based rubber - could point to products currently available to buy.

Christine Goulay, founder of consultancy Sustainabelle, who also worked in sustainable sourcing and innovation at Kering, counsels patience. "If you look at [it] historically, most of them take 30, 40, 50 years to mainstream," she says. "I think we need to just readjust what we think should be happening and when." So: a few more decades of fruit salad leather, then.

Alternative leathers generally fall into four categories: plastic, plant-plastic hybrids, bio-based, and lab-grown. Most vegan leather products you can actually buy today are the first kind: plastic. Made from polyurethane (PU) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) - pleather, to its friends - these are derived from fossil fuels, shed microplastics, cannot be repaired as effectively as real leather, smell, and will loiter in landfill and the ocean for an impressively long time.

Many plant-derived alternatives are effectively a vegetable-textile-plastic sandwich. These include Desserto, Innovera and Nutico; Banofi, made from unspecified plant fibres; and Grapeskin by Vegea, made from wine waste. Plastic content varies wildly, from as little as 2% to as much as 50%. Some use bioplastic derived from renewable resources. While many rely on food or agricultural waste, those that don't raise questions about industrial farming for plant feedstocks - land use, fertilisers, pesticides and so on. Wear over time varies, but plastic coatings generally crack and flake when bent and subjected to friction, which is unfortunate for things like shoes.

Then there are the more advanced, plastic-free alternatives: Reishi from Mycoworks, made from fungi; Alt-leather, which uses unspecified plant matter; TomTex, which uses chitosan from mushrooms and shrimp shells; and Ephea, made from mycelium. For a few years, scientists have also been working on lab-cultivated leather using cells of animal origin to grow materials mimicking real leather's properties - which makes them, technically, not vegan. These include Oval by Pact, which uses collagen derived from skincare and pharmaceutical waste, and Vitrolabs (bought by Faircraft last year), whose technology involves taking a small biopsy from a real cow.

Real leather, for its part, is a complex mix of collagen and protein fibres that make it inherently durable, flexible and repairable. Cared for properly, it can be rehabilitated, and over time it develops a patina - making it one of the only materials that improves with age, like a fine wine with a hoofprint. Since leather shoes and bags are expensive, people tend to care for them, wear them longer and keep them in circulation by donating or selling them. These are difficult properties to replicate in plastic or plant-based materials, which tend to degrade, split and resist repair.

At the heart of the debate about which material is better for the environment are two issues: livestock is responsible for between 12 and 19% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, and there are ongoing concerns that the measurement tools used to determine environmental impact are weighted to favour synthetic materials. But as biodiversity loss ramps up alongside global temperatures, rampant deforestation and the desertification of farmland, Crowley argues we need to move beyond conversations about which materials mitigate harm and start investing in materials that actively do good - a metric on which plastic cannot compete.

"We have to start thinking in a very clear-sighted way, not faffing around to sell more stuff. We need things that deliver on climate and nature," she says. "The current intensive, overproduction of meat and leather is bad. But if you compare it to regenerative farming, it's a whole different story." Regeneratively farmed materials, including wool and leather, can improve soil health, sequester carbon, increase biodiversity and restore water cycles, making landscapes more resilient to extreme weather events. "Let's just get those cattle grazing in humane, healthy ways that help farmers, that help the land and help the animal," she says. Process the hides using non-toxic chemicals, and "you could have a beautiful natural leather product that creates net positive outcomes. Why don't we replace bad leather with good leather?" A question the fruit salad leather industry has, so far, declined to answer.