Vegan leather's broken promise: billions invested, little progress on sustainability

For more than a decade, the fashion industry has marketed vegan leather as the ethical answer to a problem that seemed unsolvable: how to make shoes, bags, and jackets without the methane emissions, deforestation, chemical pollution, and animal suffering tied to traditional leather production. Billions of dollars flowed into startups promising mushroom leather, cactus leather, pineapple leather—materials that looked and felt like the real thing but carried none of the guilt. Yet the promise has curdled into something closer to a cautionary tale about how good intentions and venture capital can obscure a harder truth: the alternatives have largely failed, and the demand for traditional leather keeps climbing.

The numbers tell the story plainly. Global production of raw hides used in conventional leather has risen steadily over the past two decades, from 10.5 million tonnes in 2005 to 13.8 million tonnes in 2024, according to Textile Exchange. This is the co-product of the meat industry, and despite endless campaigns by animal rights activists and the time and money spent developing new materials, nothing has slowed its growth. About half of all leather ends up in footwear, with smaller portions going to apparel, home textiles, automotive interiors, and leather goods like bags and wallets.

The collapse has been swift and public. Three of the most prominent alternatives have stopped production entirely: Mylo, made from mushroom mycelium by Bolt Threads; Piñatex, derived from pineapple leaves by Ananas Anam; and Mirum, made from cork by Natural Fiber Welding. A fourth company, MycoWorks, which produces a lab-grown mushroom leather called Reishi, narrowly avoided insolvency last year. Investors poured over one billion dollars into these ventures, yet even that capital could not overcome the barriers that continue to block material innovators: the inability to match the price of conventional leather, the refusal of major brands to move beyond limited capsule collections, questions about how these materials actually perform, and the uncomfortable fact that most rely on binders and coatings derived from fossil fuels.

When Guardian Australia contacted more than a dozen companies producing plant-based or lab-grown leathers, only four could point to products actually available for purchase: Desserto, which uses cacti; Innovera, made from plant-based proteins; Nutico, derived from cocoa and walnut waste; and Pliant, made from bio-based rubber. The scarcity speaks to a fundamental problem. Most vegan leathers fall into one of four categories: plastic (polyurethane and polyvinyl chloride, essentially pleather); plant-plastic hybrids containing anywhere from 2 to 50 percent plastic; bio-based materials; and lab-grown alternatives. The plastic-based options, which dominate what consumers can actually buy, shed microplastics into the environment, cannot be repaired as effectively as real leather, and will persist in landfills and oceans for decades. The plant-plastic hybrids, which include materials like Desserto and Innovera, face their own problems: plastic coatings crack and flake under friction and bending, and the environmental cost of industrial farming for plant feedstocks—land use, fertilizers, pesticides—remains largely unaccounted for.

Dr. Helen Crowley, founder of Nature Matters and a former leader of nature and sustainable sourcing at the luxury conglomerate Kering, has grown skeptical of the entire enterprise. "Apple leather, orange leather, pineapple leather, fruit salad leather," she said. "It's like, seriously do we really have to call it leather?" She added: "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." Christine Goulay, a consultant who also worked in sustainable sourcing at Kering, offers a more measured view: material innovation takes time, and historically most materials take 30 to 50 years to reach mainstream adoption. But even that timeline assumes the innovations will eventually succeed, which remains far from certain.

The environmental calculus is murkier than the marketing suggests. Livestock is responsible for between 12 and 19 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a figure that has driven much of the push toward alternatives. But real leather, when properly cared for, is nearly indestructible. It can be repaired, rehabilitated, and develops a patina that improves with age. Because leather goods are expensive, people tend to care for them, wear them for years, and keep them in circulation by donating or selling them. Plastic and plant-based materials, by contrast, degrade and split and cannot be effectively repaired. The durability of real leather means fewer replacements, which matters when calculating the true environmental cost of a product over its lifetime.

Crowley argues that the conversation has been framed wrong from the start. Rather than asking which material causes the least harm, she says, the industry should be investing in materials that actively do good—a metric plastic cannot compete on. Regeneratively farmed leather and wool, she points out, can improve soil health, sequester carbon, increase biodiversity, and restore water cycles, making landscapes more resilient to extreme weather. "We have to start thinking in a very clear-sighted way, not faffing around to sell more stuff," she said. "We need things that deliver on climate and nature." The path forward, she suggests, is not to replace bad leather with plastic, but to replace bad leather with good leather—hides processed using non-toxic chemicals from cattle raised humanely on regenerative farms. It is a vision that inverts the entire premise of the vegan leather movement, and it raises a question the industry has largely avoided: what if the answer was never to abandon leather, but to transform how it is produced?