Leather gets a weird reputation.
It’s an animal product, tanning uses water and chemicals, and now we have all kinds of materials being marketed as “vegan leather” or environmentally friendly alternatives.
So, is leather sustainable?
I think the answer is a lot more interesting than just yes or no.
Since I started actually working with leather—cutting hides, making watch straps, ruining pieces, figuring out what works and what definitely doesn’t—I’ve started looking at the material completely differently.
Because one of the biggest things people seem to miss is this:
Most leather starts as a byproduct of the food industry.
Is leather a byproduct of the meat industry?
For the vast majority of leather, yes.
The animal generally wasn’t raised because somebody needed a wallet, belt, bag, or watch strap. The hide already exists because of another industry.
So once you have that hide, you can either discard it or figure out how to turn it into something useful.
Leather is basically preservation.
An untreated hide breaks down. Tanning stabilizes it and turns it into a material that can potentially last for decades.
And once you start working with good leather, you understand pretty quickly why people have used it for so long.
It bends, stretches, can be stitched and repaired, and unlike a lot of materials, getting older doesn’t necessarily make it worse.
Sometimes it makes it better.
Animals have scars and stretch marks too
This is one of my favorite things I’ve learned since I started cutting hides.
Animals have scars, wrinkles, stretch marks, scratches, insect bites, and other little marks just like we do.
You actually see that while working with the leather.
One section might have tight, smooth grain. Another can have wrinkles, scars, thin spots, or a completely different texture.
And what’s crazy is that two animals can come from the same farm, be around the same age, go through the same tannery and the same process—and still come out noticeably different.
Leather is inconsistent like that.
And I mean that in a good way.
It’s skin. It was never manufactured to be perfectly identical in the first place.
That’s also part of what makes handmade leather goods interesting. Two pieces cut from the same hide can still end up with completely different character.
What happens to leather scraps?
When you actually start cutting leather, you realize pretty quickly that the whole hide doesn’t magically become perfect wallets and watch straps.
I wish it worked like that.
You end up with weird edges, scars, thin areas, trimmings, and a pile of little scraps on your workbench wondering what the hell you’re going to do with all of it.
But small doesn’t automatically mean useless.
Scraps can become watch straps, keychains, pendants, coasters, tabs, patches, and all kinds of smaller leather goods.
A piece that’s useless for a wallet might be perfect for something else.
And even beyond that, collagen-rich hide trimmings can be used to make gelatin.
Yes.
Gelatin.
And gelatin isn’t just Jell-O. It can also be used in supplements, pharmaceutical capsules, adhesives, and other products.
Leather fibers and tiny scraps can also be broken down and re-formed into bonded or recycled leather-fiber materials.
And before somebody comes after me:
No, bonded leather is not the same thing as full-grain leather.
Full-grain, top-grain, split, genuine, bonded…
Leather terminology is honestly kind of a mess.
That’s a rabbit hole for another day.
But while you’re eating your Jell-O, taking your supplements, gluing together an art project, or wearing your Lopez Studio watch strap, keep in mind that all of those can involve materials that started as a byproduct and were repurposed into something useful.
I think that’s pretty damn cool.
Sustainability is also about how long you keep something
This part is personal for me.
My uncle passed away from cancer nearly a decade ago, but I still remember a conversation we had like it was yesterday.
He had a pair of shoes he always wore around the house.
They were beat up.
Really beat up.
I asked him about them, and he told me he had bought them as a teenager in Mexico.
Those shoes were easily thirty or forty years old.
They were incredibly simple: vegetable-tanned leather held together with lacing, with a rubber sole.
Except the sole wasn’t some brand-new piece of rubber.
It was cut from an old discarded tire.
Leather and an old tire.
That was basically it.
And decades later, he was still wearing them.
They were scratched, stretched, darkened, and very obviously used—but they were still shoes.
That has stuck with me.
I’m not pretending the cow had zero environmental impact.
I’m not pretending producing the tire had zero impact either.
But that tire served one purpose, then part of it was turned into something else, and my uncle used the finished product for decades.
If we’re going to talk about sustainability, I think longevity has to count for something.
Something can have the perfect “eco-friendly” label, but if it falls apart and gets replaced every year, I don’t know how much we really accomplished.
My uncle’s shoes were never marketed as sustainable.
They were just made from materials people had available.
And then he kept wearing them.
For decades.
If that isn’t at least part of what sustainability should mean, I’m not sure what is.
Leather can actually get better with age
Vegetable-tanned leather is especially interesting because it develops patina.
Basically, it changes as you use it.
Sunlight, oils from your hands, scratches, moisture, and everyday life slowly alter the color and appearance.
People actually seek out veg-tan leather because they want to watch that happen.
It’s kind of like a fine wine—it gets better with age.
At least that’s what people who drink fine wine tell me.
Personally, give me the cheap boxed stuff and I’m perfectly happy.
But you get the point.
Instead of aging automatically meaning “time to replace it,” the aging itself becomes part of why people like the material.
Does that mean all leather is sustainable?
No.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you leather magically has no environmental impact.
It does.
The animal had an impact. The tannery had an impact. Shipping had an impact. Turning the leather into a finished product has an impact.
Tanning uses water, energy, and chemicals, and how a tannery handles those things matters.
What interests me is what happens across the whole life of the material.
If we take a material that already exists as a byproduct, use as much of it as we reasonably can, find uses for some of the leftovers, and turn it into something somebody keeps for years or decades, I think that deserves to be part of the sustainability conversation.
Maybe you disagree with me.
That’s completely fair.
“Sustainable” gets thrown around so much that I’m not even sure everybody means the same thing when they use it.
I’m not claiming leather is perfect.
I just think it deserves a more interesting conversation than simply calling it sustainable or unsustainable.
What about vegan leather?
This is where things get even more interesting.
“Vegan leather” tells you one thing:
It isn’t animal leather.
It doesn’t necessarily tell you what it actually is.
Some conventional synthetic leathers use polyurethane or PVC. Other newer materials incorporate plant fibers, agricultural waste, cactus, mushrooms, and all kinds of other things.
Some of those are honestly really cool.
Cactus leather especially interests me.
I’ve actually had a chance to see and touch it in person, and it immediately made me think about ways I could use something like that in a future product.
Then there’s salmon leather.
Obviously not vegan.
But it interests me for the same reason traditional leather does: it takes a byproduct and turns it into something useful.
And the texture looks awesome.
That’s the part of all this that excites me more than trying to pick a winner between “real” and “vegan” leather.
I want to see what people keep coming up with.
But I still want to know what a material is actually made from, what holds it together, how it ages, and how long it lasts before I call it sustainable.
I’m not loyal to leather just because it’s leather.
I’m loyal to materials that look good, feel good, last, and make sense to use.
So, is leather sustainable?
Here’s where I’ve personally landed.
Leather has an environmental impact.
Of course it does.
But I also think it’s pretty remarkable that we can take a hide produced largely as a byproduct, preserve it, find uses for some of the leftovers, and turn the main material into something that can potentially stay useful for decades.
The more I work with leather, the more I appreciate that.
I’m still learning.
I’m definitely still screwing things up.
I’ve cut pieces wrong, gotten glue where glue definitely wasn’t supposed to go, stitched things crooked, and found beautiful sections of leather right next to areas I had absolutely no idea what to do with.
That’s part of working with a natural material.
And honestly, that’s part of why I like it.
At Lopez Studio, I don’t want the goal to just be making more stuff.
I want to make things that feel worth keeping.
Use good material.
Waste as little as I realistically can.
Use scraps when there’s something useful I can make from them.
Repair something instead of replacing it when that makes sense.
And hopefully make products that look even better after somebody has actually lived with them for a while.
Maybe that isn’t a perfect definition of sustainability.
But it makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than making something disposable.