Vegan interiors are not necessarily more sustainable than leather

A recent report from the Markets Institute at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), however, asks us all to pause, and consider the facts. The most salient of which is that leather used in cars is, and has always been, a waste product at source, and is therefore one of the earliest examples of up-cycling and the circular economy in action (because it has a further use when the car is scrapped).

Hides for leather are a by-product of the beef and dairy industries. The global automotive industry takes about 20 per cent of all leather hides produced as a result of our insatiable demand for beef, and uses them for leather on seats, steering wheels and so on. One of the biggest producers of farmed beef cattle (and therefore also of deforestation, which we’ll come to), Brazil, relies on the car brands to take away a huge amount of its extraneous hides.

What happens if car companies turn around tomorrow and ditch leather in response to the growing consumer demand for vegan alternatives? One of two things: the hides get made into gelatin (about 35 per cent), or, more often, they are transported to landfill, where they sit decaying, producing methane, which, as we all now know, is not good news for global warming.

Meanwhile, most vegan alternatives contain plastics, which have the double whammy of relying on fossil fuels for their manufacture, and not degrading before they enter marine ecosystems, the air as particulates, or, again, landfill.

Hmm. So far, so not good for vegan interiors.

Like every sustainability journey consumers are on, however, it’s a little more complicated than that. The WWF report points out that leather for cars is only a good thing if the original cattle were farmed on land that has been neither deforested or converted from its original use into intensively farmed, agricultural land for the purpose of farming cattle. This is called DCF beef, and thus car manufacturers should only be using DCF hides in their cars. Furthermore, growing soy is a major aggravator in deforestation, and soy feeds the cattle, so it’s incumbent upon those sourcing hides for leather to interrogate both the origin of the cows, and their feed.

It’s possible - the supply chain is growing more transparent every year. And we can see that the leather industry lags behind here:  according to the most recent Forest 500 report, while that source of all evil, palm oil (check your ingredients list on everything from soap to chocolate) has more than 50 per cent now sourced from land with a forest-protection commitment, most of the leather industry’s sources have made no such commitment.

One notable exception in the leather industry is, thankfully for car brands, Bridge of Weir. If you drive, among others, an Aston, Land Rover, Volvo, Lotus or even a Lucid (lucky you), the chances are you sit on Bridge of Weir leather. As well as sourcing 98 per cent of its raw hides in the UK, recycling 40 per cent of its treated water at its Scottish plant, and installing a thermal energy piece of trickery that converts used energy into steam to power its tannery, Bridge of Weir only works with suppliers who can show 100 per cent traceability back to the cattle, the land on which they’re farmed and the food they’re given. They can confidently say that the leather on which we sit unthinkingly every day in no way links us to deforestation.

And that’s quite some peace of mind. I’m not sure those who plump for a vegan interior can have quite such a comprehensive view of their place in the world and exactly what the power of their purchase has enabled, just out of sight, down the links of that supply chain. But shouldn’t we all?