What nonsense. First off, using waste products isn't the same as recycling, and secondly, leather isn't, and never has been throughout human history, considered a waste product.

If there was no demand for leather, the price of beef would have to be higher in order for revenue to ranchers to remain the same. Higher beef prices would cause worldwide consumption of beef to be lower, which would be a boon for the environment. ~30% of the world's non-ice-covered land is dedicated, directly or indirectly, to meat production. It's an incredibly inefficient and environmentally destructive source of nutrition.

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I have leather seats in my Prius. So why doesn't PETA go after Toyota? How about every other automaker? Good luck finding a car company that doesn't offer leather.

If you don't like leather, don't buy it. There are bigger problems to deal with, particularly when it comes to animal treatment.

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I happen to like leather. It's hard to find a synthetic that can beat Nature's standard for durability and waterproofing.

Modern agribusiness is going to use every part of the cow for something regardless of the market demand. Leather is probably much more useful and lasts longer than anything else the skin would be used for. If the demand for leather disappeared, the demand for meat and milk would still support almost the same number of cows being raised and slaughtered every year (despite somewhat higher prices). In fact, it's more accurate to say that beef keeps leather prices low than leather keeps beef prices low.

So, considering the ratio of utility to extra environmental impact for leather, can one even find an alternative that is as durable, as waterproof, and as easy to clean while contributing less to pollution? Modern leather may not be the buffalo-hide teepee of past eras, but it's still a clever use of resources.

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Do they put leather in the Prius now? They didn't for years for almost precisely the reasons PETA cites. I'm suprised to hear that they do.

I like leather, but only because it's easy to clean. I'd take leatherette or Chrysler's YES!essentials.

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"Modern agribusiness is going to use every part of the cow for something regardless of the market demand."

Yes, but the price would drop drastically if there wasn't a significant consumer demand for it.

"If the demand for leather disappeared, the demand for meat and milk would still support almost the same number of cows being raised and slaughtered every year (despite somewhat higher prices)."

That's like saying that it doesn't make any difference if you eat flank steak because ranchers would still raise the cattle to produce all of the other cuts of meat if you stopped eating it. Either way, you're still contributing to the profitability of cattle raising and thus the price of the other cattle products. The official world leather trade was $43B in 1994-1996, with an additional informal market estimated to be about the same, roughly three times the world meat market:

http://www.factbook.net/leather_evolution.php

Now, to be fair, there's a lot of "value added" labor going in there; only a fraction of that money goes to the farmers. But this is anything but a case of "beef keeping leather prices low."

"can one even find an alternative that is as durable, as waterproof, and as easy to clean while contributing less to pollution?"

Virtually all alternatives contribute significantly less pollution. The majority of the energy in the source material is in the end product (with animals, it's not even close), and you avoid a lot of the nasty chemicals used in tanning and all of the other dozen or so stages of leather preparation. Modern synthetic leathers are more waterproof, durable, easier to clean, and breathable (you forgot that one!) than leather -- for example, Lorica.

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Leather in the Pruis is done by the dealers...NOT Toyota.

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"Leather in the Pruis is done by the dealers...NOT Toyota."

Actually, since the 2006 model year, a leather trimmed interior has been a factory option for the Prius.

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Vegetarians and the like often complain that it takes more land to raise cattle than to raise grain, implying that beef is bad. I suspect these are the people that have never seen a farm or a ranch.

Because most people do not live in the midwest let me correct a few sources of misunderstanding.
Farming/ranching is a way to make money so you don't do things that cost you money. In order to raise crops on a section of land it has to have good soil, enough water, flat enough to work with equipment etc. These same requirements do not apply to cattle. You can raise cattle on land you can't grow corn on, due to hills, soil quality, lack of irrigation etc. land that has been used to grow corn in the summer is used to run the cows in the winter. The cattle eat the stalks and provide fertilizer, their diet is supplemented with rye and alfalfa hay that was grown in the summer on another parcel of land. The alfalfa adds nitrogen to the soil ... naturally.

So yes raising cattle uses more land than raising grain, because you don't run cattle on "good" land you run them on low quality land that isn't good for raising grain. Reducing cattle production would not allow the increase in grain production that you might think.

Leather is easy to keep clean (good for my allergies) does not out-gas toxic fumes or produce toxic smoke when it burns like vinyl or plastic, and lasts a very long time. You can't tell me that synthetic fibers produced from oil are better for the environment that leather.

PETA is their own worst enemy. I don't know anyone who would disagree that animals should be treated fairly but nobody takes PETA seriously. They say the stupidest things, people think they are a bunch of wacko's. They just distract people from the cause they claim to support.

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@ri

I think the point that environmental vegetarians (PETA is a humane treatment-focused group) make is that, per area, growing vegetables/fruits/grains yields more nutrition than ranchland. You lose a certain amount of that nutrition running the cow.

This isn't as big an issue in, say, the American widwest and Canadian praries (grassland anyways, so the loss isn't as large) but it is an issue in the greenbelts and rainforests of the world that are being razed for cattle.

It's also worth noting that forests are very good ways to lock carbon out of the atmosphere (cattle are very much not good at this). If we're going to insist on burning fuel, it's in our best interest to encourage reforestration to keep the results of said fuel-burning locked back in.

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I don't disagree with the more nutrition per area of crop land vs ranch land.

The point the point they try to make is based on the incorrect assumption that all ranch land could be converted to crop land.

Just about any land can be ranch land but only fertile soil can be crop land.

Ranch land is typically sandy, dry, overly hilly, or otherwise unsuitable for crop land, otherwise it would be used as such.

Wisconsin for example has good soil but has more hills than say Kansas. Wisconsin is know for cheeses due to the large number of dairy farms.

Good land allows more cattle per unit area that in a area with poor soil.

Even with good soil the terrain might not be suitable for farming and it would not be economically feasible or environmentally responsible to change this.

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If the vast majority of leather comes from cattle that would've been slaughtered for food anyway, then leather does seem like an efficient use of inedible remainder (a.k.a. waste) of the animal.

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If you have ever been to a rain forest country, ie, Costa Rica (which is one of the better ones), it is blatantly obvious the environmental damage done by cattle farming. So many primary forests have been cut down for grazing. Granted there are economic benefits to the farmer (ie making any money at all).

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"This isn't as big an issue in, say, the American widwest and Canadian praries (grassland anyways, so the loss isn't as large) but it is an issue in the greenbelts and rainforests of the world that are being razed for cattle."

Right now Soy bean crops and world demand for Soy based products is outstripping the destruction of rain forests than beef farming. Contrary to a lot of the animal rights claims, beef farming has many positive side effects other than just meat that are glossed over in their stats. Often their stats are based off of what an adult animal consumes but take no consideration that the cattle are slaughtered as soon as they are full grown and do not take the same resources when they are growing. They do not take into account spin off benefits from the cattle industry like leather. They do not take into account that in many places in the world vegetarian or vegan diets are impossible if you try to do it locally. So the nutrients you need will have to be shipped to you from elsewhere in the world. So your average Soybean or grain crop may have a lower environmental impact locally in terms of carbon foot print, but the land becomes completely unusable as habitat for any other species of animal that wants to use it and its environmental impact raises dramatically when you factor in shipping and distribution.

In my opinion the most environmentally friendly protein source we have is hunted meat that has been harvested with in a sustainable hunting system.

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