This website's love of leather is consumerist btw. It's not revolutionary or sustainable. It's a high-status fashion item which is entirely unnecessary (we could replace all leather with existing plant materials yesterday). It's popular on this website because the marketing around it allows people to disguise their consumerism as #sustainable and #vintage and #punk.
In reality, leather tanning poisons the global south with heavy metals. And it's impossible to rear cattle without contributing hugely to climate change. We can't keep pretending it's a byproduct which somehow doesn't count. As if beef died on the cross and absolved all other cow products of their sins. Leather is a huge part of the profitability of the cattle industry. Even pretending a leather bag has a 100 year lifespan, it's not worth the CO2 or heavy metal pollution required to produce it. It would be drastically better to replace 1 leather bag with 20 hemp bags. And, of course, none of this even mentions the abject torture the cow had to go through.
And like, we can be a little consumerist. I'm not making the "you hate capitalism and have an iphone" argument. I don't care if you own leather or buy it second hand. But what is genuinely harmful is falling for the marketing and thinking leather is somehow revolutionary, or even worse, that opposition to leather is reactionary.
