[MadinMumbai]

Originally Posted by Exhuberance

Responsibility for everyone's own individual carbon footprint !

Aha! Then perhaps more attention should be on the word 'cars' than on 'demand for leather' in the thread heading. New cars surely have a bigger carbon footprint than leather seats in them cars.

[Exhuberance]

Originally Posted by MadinMumbai

Aha! Then perhaps more attention should be on the word 'cars' than on 'demand for leather' in the thread heading. New cars surely have a bigger carbon footprint than leather seats in them cars.

Is that though? The whole discussion of EVs v/s ICE vehicles can also then turn into Cars than the 'Fuel' in them cars

[MadinMumbai]

Apples and oranges. Different arguments. But well done.

[DeepCarTalk]

As i am part of the leather industry where we manufacturer for various international brands that are sold across the World, i have a fair bit of idea about this.

1. Leather is a by product as someone has mentioned. Meat is the reason why animals are killed.

2. Animal Hides that come from dairy industry every year= 300 Million. Out of which just 60% is used to make leather. So if you see, the ratio is already towards the meat side.

3. Leather is bad for the environement? Yes and no. As i mentioned that only 60% of the hide is used to make leather, about 40% is thrown away. That is over 120 Million hides or 560 Million Sq ft. of hide or enough hide to cover 78000 football fields. Which roughly translates to about 3 Million tons of landfill waste that generates 2.7 Million tons of greenhouse gases every year.

4. 2.7 Million tons of Greenhouse gases sound bad? The fashion industry (mostly Apparel industry) produces a whopping 144 billion pieces of clothing items every year. The carbon this releases requires a brain numbing 2.5 BILLION acres of forest just to balance it out.

5. Leather is not so bad afterall: How? Leather is part of what people call slow fashion. You buy a t-shirt and you wear it for 6 months to a year. You buy a leather wallet/Bag/Shoe etc. and you can easily use it for 5-10 years. This means lower turnover per person. Hence it saves on multiple levels (lesser transportation, lesser material production, lesser general pollution)

5(2). We have been making and using leather for hundreds of years and over the last 50 years, new technologies have been developed, there are cleaner methods of production that minimise pollution during production of the leather.

6. What is a good alternative? It's not PU because anything made out of plastic is just bad news delays. Sure your new car won't use leather but the plastic it will use won't decompose over thousands of years, it'll break down to microplastics that will eventually become part of our food chain (if it hasn't already?).

Vegan options as someone suggested is good in the headlines but in reality it's very limited till now. Leather out of mango pulp, pineapple, cork, etc. is in the early stages and still utilise use of PU in the process where these items are bonded with PU.

Also these things are produced in far out places (not locally available) hence the transportation will not only make it expensive but also very polluting.


It might sound like i am supporting my industry but the truth is as long as people eat meat and animals are killed for it, leather is the only way to minimise the harm done.

Some cleaner methods of leather production are:

Vegetable Tanned leather.
Wet-White tanning of leather.
Chrome-Free produced leather.

You can also read this to understand the current trend of sustainability in terms of leather- https://www.popularstyles.in/post/su...lityjustatrend

[pavanmadhini]

Originally Posted by Exhuberance

Let me wade head first in this debate.

Starting with meat consumption, specially beef, there are numerous studies now to clearly say that this is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Maybe read this
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrv...h=2f379eca5206

Or maybe the members can go through any of the Environmental documentaries on Netflix - Gamechangers, Kiss the ground, Cowspiracy, etc.

1. Perhaps meat consumption is not so bad for the environment after all:

https://youtu.be/SdrhpThqlCo

2. All of the Netflix documentaries can also be called pop science and there have been rebuttals as well. Without getting into the scientific accuracies of either side, I'm more inclined to believe that vegans are way more aggressive in pushing their agenda coming from a moral pedestal. I don't think they really care about the environment as much as they do about feeling that they are that much better than everyone else. It fits their agenda so the environment becomes one more piece in their political toolkit.

[fhdowntheline]

I am reminded of Michael Crichton's novel " State of Fear" after seeing all these claims and counterclaims about climate change.

I think that man had way more foresight than many so-called scholars.
Even his core narrative in the Jurassic Park series, where the dinosaurs find a way to breed because of adaptations by certain cells within their biological architecture, seems eerily similar to the recent discovery on xenobots, or living robot cells which can reproduce!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart...uce-180979150/

[digitalnirvana]

Originally Posted by fhdowntheline

I am reminded of Michael Crichton's novel " State of Fear" after seeing all these claims and counterclaims about climate change.

I think that man had way more foresight than many so-called scholars.

As someone who has admired and read Chrichton for 25 years, I've got to say you got the message completely wrong. The guy was a fiction writer who liked to dabble in science and build a story on top of it.

If you consider his opinion as gospel over the research of hundreds and thousands of actual scientists - well done.

Also, ironically, State of Fear was a way to highlight Crichton's criticism of politics meddling with science. Remember the "consensus isn't science" speech?

The climate change deniers do exactly that though. Mix politics with science. Tremendous irony which they don't realise, all while citing Chrichton to back up their worldview.

[Arun Varma]

Amazon's catastrophic deforestation is a case of human kind taking the easy way out for short term gains ignoring the long term pitfalls. Leather and meat are just isolated manifestations of this problem.

There is enough and more evidence that the "current rate of consumption of meat" is bad for our planet. Does that mean we have to go vegan - not really, but we can cut down the consumption so our bodies can optimise the absorption. Unfortunately, solutions like these are too nuanced for people to comprehend. Sadly, pretty much every solution to the problems of the world is nuanced.

We tend to, at least on social media, take a binary perspective on pretty much every subject and hold our ground against all odds and facts. Never before in our history have we seen such dichotomy on issues. This polarisation defeats any attempt at meaningful dialogue and solution finding.

What is very clear, however, is the need for people to get a more thorough grounding in the scientific method. Unfortunately, more and more people are moving the other way!

[MadinMumbai]

Originally Posted by Arun Varma

We tend to, at least on social media, take a binary perspective on pretty much every subject and hold our ground against all odds and facts.

I couldn’t agree more. This all or nothing approach leaves no room for a reasoned conversation. There’s a lot that can be done if we simply tempered down the discourse. Surely getting meat eaters to reduce their consumption is not a difficult target. Most reasonable people will buy into the ethical argument if it is made against wasteful consumption. But the moment the conversation is about passing judgment on people for what they eat or wear the it’s lost cause.

[Exhuberance]

Well, meat packaging and processing is a huge industry in the West. And they have even more resources at their disposal than the vegans to debunk these studies(coming from actual scientists than vegan scientists) The same story had played out for decades when the first evidences and studies against smoking/ tobacco came out.
It took decades for popular acceptance that ‘smoking is injurious to health’. Am not against an occasional puff or against meat consumption but because people demand/ prefer meat(and leather) doesn’t automatically make it an environmentally better option.

Calling more and more evidence pop science is just burying our head in the sand.

Here’s one chart for you all