When we decided to launch our sneakers, we basically had two options for the material:

1. Animal leather (cowhide in this case, by far the most common leather in footwear)
2. Synthetic leather: faux leathers (“plastic” leathers such as “skai”, for example) and so-called plant-based leathers (made from apple, pineapple or grape waste, for example).

Why animal leather seemed like a good option to us

Cowhide seemed like the best choice. Its comfort and toughness are very hard to reproduce artificially. Well, yes: it is, after all, the skin of an animal that can live outdoors all year round.

The main advantages of animal leather over synthetic leather:

• It is almost waterproof
• It keeps you warm while staying breathable
• It absorbs the moisture from sweat, which prevents odours
• It is comfortable: in the shoe trade, they say it has “give”. Just as skin adapts to the animal as it grows, leather adapts to the shape of your foot
• It is very hard-wearing: every supplier we spoke to agreed that synthetic materials crack and wear out over time, whereas leather (if it is properly nourished) holds up.

But not everyone saw things the way we did.

It all started in August 2019. We were explaining on Instagram what was so good about our leather card holder when, out of nowhere:

And more recently, under the video of our TEDx talk, in between two enthusiastic comments:

In short, we were being told that leather pollutes and kills animals, so we couldn't call ourselves an ethical brand and make leather products.

And to be completely honest, we realised we hadn't given the question enough thought. After all, if so many brands that call themselves "ethical" are simply dropping this material altogether, maybe there's a good reason. So it was time to work out, properly, whether we could consider ourselves ethical and still sell leather. That meant digging into three huge aspects of leather:

1. Animal ethics
2. Environmental pollution
3. The social and societal side

Animal ethics: can you wear leather and respect animal welfare?

Before we start, let's be clear about one thing: yes, buying leather does encourage livestock farming a little. We say this because it is not at all what the leather industry claims. According to them, the economic value of the hide is only a small part of the value of a cow¹, so even if hides stopped being sold, cows would still be raised for milk and meat. In short, leather is supposedly just a by-product of the dairy and meat industries, and all the leather industry does is “make use of waste” that would otherwise have to be incinerated or left to rot in landfill. A kind of age-old upcycling.

That's partly true, but it's still a bit too convenient… If cowhides weren't sold, livestock farming would be slightly less profitable. It wouldn't happen overnight, but in the long run, you can imagine there would be a little less livestock farming.

So the question of animal welfare does apply to leather.

In fact, it applies far more to milk², which accounts for most of the value of a dairy cow. There is no such thing as a cow raised for its milk that isn't then killed for its meat – dairy cows end up on your plate. So if you consider that a company isn't ethical because it uses leather, you have to pass the same judgement on every company that uses milk, butter and so on.

We turn a blind eye to a system that makes animals suffer

Before we got called out on this, we were rather burying our heads in the sand about the ethics of livestock farming. We had seen a few horrific slaughterhouse videos filmed by L214 (a French animal rights group), but we told ourselves it was still possible to work with farmers who do things properly and respect their animals.

It has to be said that in our urban consumer society, we are pretty far removed from the realities of farming. If all you see is advertising and marketing, you get the impression everything is fine.

In fact, we've looked away for so long that today, factory farming has become the norm, even in France. You know the picture: battery chickens, pigs that never see daylight and spend their whole lives on a tiny patch of concrete…

But when it comes to leather, cattle farming is what matters most. Intensification is less advanced in France and Europe (only 13% of cattle farming in France is intensive), but that's not the case in other countries. In the United States, for example, feedlots (intensive farms with more than 1,000 head of cattle) are the preferred model: animals crammed together in atrocious conditions, with growth hormones, fattening on animal meal, or antibiotics used as growth promoters.

How did we get here? Basically, because most of us don't give the interests of animals the same weight as those of humans. We tell ourselves it's “normal” or “natural” to eat meat and cheese, drink milk or wear leather. That humans have done it since the dawn of time, so there's no need to rack our brains over animal welfare.

But the more we dug into the subject, the more we had to face the obvious: we should give the interests of animals the same weight as those of humans.

We'll explain it all now. If you're not particularly interested, you don't need to read this part to understand the rest of the article: you can click here to skip it. But if the subject is completely new to you, you might find it worth a look.

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A short primer on antispeciesism (or why the interests of animals deserve the same weight as those of humans)‍

The first antispeciesist thinker is Peter Singer. He's no lightweight: his book “Animal Liberation”, written in the 1970s, has sold more than a million copies.

According to him, “speciesists”, in other words people who treat the interests of animals differently from those of humans, follow the same patterns of thinking as racists (who treat the interests of other “races” differently) or sexists (who treat the interests of the other sex differently). He also argues that in a few decades, given the conditions we keep animals in today, our children or grandchildren will look at us the way we now look at slave owners or men who beat their wives.

Wait, what? When we first heard this, we started (mentally) reaching for a whole pile of objections to justify our lives as meat and cheese eaters and leather wearers. Here are the main arguments we came up with… and how the antispeciesists knocked each one down:

1/ “Farming animals is normal: humans have always eaten meat and worn leather.”

To which the antispeciesists reply: “True, but a practice being old doesn't make it ethical. We organised animal fights for a very long time; that's no reason to carry on. And besides, there are 7 billion of us now, which might call for a few changes compared with the Neolithic.”³‍

2/ “But eating meat is natural: look at animals, they eat each other."

To which the antispeciesists reply: “Natural doesn't mean moral. Some animals are cannibals or rape each other. Does that mean we should copy them? And some carnivores have to eat other animals to survive. We don't.”‍

3/  “OK, but we're a different species, so we're allowed. We're humans, they're ANIMALS, that's not the same thing, surely?”

‍To which the antispeciesists reply: “That's a completely arbitrary belief: it's no different from a slave owner discriminating against Black people because of the colour of their skin”.‍

4/ “But it's not the same: our abilities are far superior to those of other animals. We're more intelligent, we can talk, we use tools…”

To which the antispeciesists reply: “Imagine a society that discriminates on the basis of intelligence, say. Babies, or people with severe mental disabilities, are less able to reason than chimpanzees. Should chimpanzees therefore be given greater rights than them? Obviously not. And you could run the same argument for every other human ability: over the last few decades, we've learned that some animals can use tools, master languages, be self-aware, and so on. So discriminating between living beings on the basis of their abilities simply doesn't hold up.”‍

5/ “Fine, but there's still one proof that we need to eat animals: we can't survive without vitamin B12, and only they can make it”.

‍To which the antispeciesists reply: “It's true that some animals, such as ruminants, make vitamin B12 thanks to the bacteria in their gut. But is taking supplements really a problem? After all, we already give babies vitamin D supplements to make up for the lack of sun, and we add iodine to salt to prevent cretinism.”‍

6/ “But it would be a problem for our food supply: traditional farming isn't possible without animals. You have to fertilise the soil with manure (animal dung), as we've done since the dawn of time.”

To which the antispeciesists reply: “Wrong: we don't need animals to grow crops.”

Aaargh, they really are annoying. So we spent some time clearing up this question of farming. And we concluded that here too, they are (partly) right: traditional farming without animals and without chemical fertilisers is entirely possible, even if it's a bit harder. We explain why below.

A quick aside: is farming without animals possible? 
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If you look at our history, you might think animals are essential to keeping soil fertile. From Antiquity until the dawn of industrial agriculture, all over Europe, farmers used crop rotation systems⁴ with one year of fallow. Nothing like today's fallow land imposed by the CAP (the EU's Common Agricultural Policy), which is just bare ground. Back then, fallow meant letting the soil rest by growing a meadow on it and letting animals graze it (in other words, the animals eat the grass all day, digest it and return it as manure, full of nutrients for the soil). Attempts to do away with fallow by replacing it with simple nitrogen-fixing crops led to a fall in yields over the long term, due to a lack of phosphorus or potash (the main nutrients plants can't do without are nitrogen, phosphorus and potash)… As the agronomist Pierre-Paul Dehérain put it in the 19th century: “for fallow to have been kept up for centuries, it must have had some advantages.” Well, yes:  if a more productive farming system had been found, we would have dropped the animals long ago, wouldn't we?

Except.

Over the last few decades, our knowledge of agronomy has moved on. We now know that everything is cyclical and that animals don't “create” nutrients. In the 19th century, it became clear that what made fallow meadows so valuable was not the animals grazing on them but mainly 1- certain plants that fix nitrogen from the air 2- the activity of mycorrhizal fungi, which are particularly at home under meadows and help plants take up phosphorus and potash. So farm animals are really just unnecessary middlemen: you can perfectly well have an effective fallow without animals. And that's not all: in the 1970s, we even worked out how to fix phosphorus and potassium without rotating crops at all. For example, you can cover the soil with shredded young tree branches (ramial chipped wood) to recreate a kind of forest humus that encourages mycorrhizal fungi to develop. In short, across most of the world, it is now perfectly possible to imagine cyclical farming without animals. And there are plenty of examples around the world of people already doing it successfully.

So, goodbye calves, cows and pigs? Are animals completely useless in traditional farming? No, that would be jumping the gun.

First, manure allows “fertility transfers”. For example, you can graze animals on uncultivated grassland (40% of arable land in France) or land that can't be cultivated (mid-altitude mountains, say), then bring them into the barn at night or over winter, collect the manure there and spread it on the cultivated fields. In short, animals don't create nutrients, but they let you concentrate them on certain plots and so boost yields. It's like magic: you get more agricultural output for the same amount of human labour (even if the potential for producing calories is lower: you would get more calories by cultivating both the field and the meadow).

Second, animals do farmers plenty of favours, such as hens eating the insects that damage crops, or pigs and goats eating leftovers and clearing plots of brambles and roots.

Then there's animal power, which is still very useful (even essential in some countries) for field work, such as sowing or loosening the soil.

Finally, on so-called “marginal” land, too poor to be cultivated, livestock is the only way to feed people. In Greenland, it's just as well the Inuit can eat seals to survive. In the Sahel, it's just as well there are herds on the move to feed the population.

Conclusion: farming without animals and without chemical fertilisers is possible, but it's a bit more of a struggle. End of the aside!

In any case, antispeciesist philosophy is very robust: we read dozens and dozens of articles, watched hours of TV debates with Aymeric Caron (a French journalist and animal rights campaigner) and read all 427 comments under “is there a moral case for meat?”, and every argument we usually hear against antispeciesism belongs more in the fallacy or bad-faith drawer.

Once you've dug into antispeciesism, you understand that livestock farming is neither normal, nor natural, nor necessary, whatever people say. From then on, if you want to justify it, there is only one question to ask:

“Can the well-being we get from livestock farming justify the animal suffering it may cause?”

Bearing in mind that this “well-being” can cover several things. First, of course, there's the pleasure of eating meat or dairy products, or the comfort of wearing leather clothes. There's also the attachment to a certain culinary and cultural heritage, the satisfaction of supporting small farmers, the pleasure of seeing cows frolicking in meadows, the freedom of being able to eat without thinking too hard about what's in your meal… And there's a form of collective well-being too. Even if farming without animals and without fertilisers is theoretically possible, in practice, today, the vast majority of small, responsible farms use animal manure.

When you put the question of livestock farming in these terms, it becomes simply impossible to look away from farming conditions, as we too often tend to do. Who could claim that their passing pleasure is worth MORE than an animal's suffering over an entire lifetime? Factory farming becomes absolutely intolerable: you can't look away anymore.

In fact, there are only two possible answers.

First answer: livestock farming must be abolished, as some antispeciesists demand. So everyone has to go “vegan” and stop consuming any product of animal origin: leather, wool, meat, milk, cheese, eggs, fish. Animals have the right to live free and die a natural death, so nothing can justify taking that right away just for our personal pleasure. In short, nothing can justify livestock farming.

Second answer: livestock farming is acceptable, provided as much animal suffering as possible is removed from it. This is the so-called “welfarist” answer⁵, the one held by Peter Singer himself. In that case, the first thing to do is make sure animals can grow up without suffering, in conditions suited to their species: farm animals are sentient beings with a nervous system, so they want to avoid suffering just as much as we do. Second, they must be killed in the most respectful way possible. Unlike the abolitionists, welfarists consider that farm animals don't have the same ability as humans to anticipate and make plans, so they don't realise they are going to be killed and don't suffer from that thought throughout their lives (for cows, this is what Temple Grandin, for example, has shown; she is one of the world's leading specialists in cattle behaviour).

But is this welfarism possible in practice?

Is farming without animal suffering possible?

While we can be sure that living conditions are very bad on intensive farms, that doesn't mean small, family-run cattle farms are free of animal suffering.

In France, more than 80% of farms are small or medium-sized, with fewer than 100 animals. And it's true that among them, plenty of small farmers work every day to respect animal welfare. For example, their cattle graze outdoors most of the year, they put straw down indoors for extra comfort, they take care over pain during dehorning⁶, they let calves suckle from their mothers, they brush their animals, talk to them, and so on. In short, there are plenty of farmers who love their animals and take the greatest care of them, even if one day they have to send them to the slaughterhouse.

But that's not the case on all of these farms. There are still many others where dehorning is painful, castration is done without anaesthetic… And on dairy farms, calves are very often separated from their mothers, cows are artificially inseminated again and again, male calves are slaughtered... On top of that, some farmers are sometimes in such financial difficulty that focusing on animal welfare is far from easy: hard to go and cuddle your cows when you can't make ends meet (so before blaming them, we should start by redirecting CAP subsidies towards the smallest farms).

And then there are the slaughterhouses. For reasons of hygiene and public health, slaughtering animals on the farm is banned in France. So farmers have no choice but to send their animals to the slaughterhouse. The problem is that abuses are common, some of which have been exposed by L214's chilling videos. And in these places, animal suffering often goes hand in hand with human suffering, with degrading working conditions⁷ for the workers. Not to mention the long, stressful journeys, for farmers and animals alike. The most plausible solution for reducing animal suffering and industrial slaughter would be the development of mobile slaughterhouses that travel to the farm, as is already the case in Germany and Sweden. In recent months, the first trials have been authorised in France. But we are still a very long way from seeing them everywhere.

How can this animal suffering be reduced?

At Loom, in the long run, we would of course like to see all animal suffering disappear⁸. We don't all see things the same way: some of the team think we will one day have to do without livestock farming altogether, others hope for farming without animal suffering (roughly speaking: letting cows live with their calves, not systematically slaughtering the males, putting cows through fewer pregnancies even if it means less milk, and so on).

Still, if we want to improve animal welfare, we don't think giving up leather in the short term is the answer. Boycotting it would make existing farms less profitable and favour the most intensive ones, which optimise their costs. It would also put extra financial pressure on small farmers who are already struggling and often find it hard to make ends meet. Animal welfare measures that don't bring in money would tend to fade away, and that could even increase the risk of mistreatment on farms and in slaughterhouses. As Albert Schweitzer said: "In slaughterhouses, it is not human cruelty that causes animal suffering, it is economic pressure".

What we must do, on the other hand, is choose at all costs a leather that comes from the farms that treat their animals best, and encourage them to improve their practices, for instance by agreeing to pay more for their leather. Except that there is no traceability good enough to allow that kind of thing.

Leather: the untraceable world

Through what we eat, it is possible to support small-scale farming and boycott factory farming: you can choose to buy only direct from the producer or through short supply chains, from small organic or free-range farms, or from restaurants, butchers and cheese shops with responsible, transparent sourcing. Yes, it costs a lot more, but that's the true price of this food, and we need to eat less of it anyway (at a national level, it's impossible for everyone to eat a lot of animal products: there would never be enough small farms to produce that much).

With leather, it is much harder to “vote with your wallet”. Unlike milk or meat, it is almost impossible to know what kind of farm a hide comes from. Today, in slaughterhouses, hides are grouped _{in batches} that are more or less uniform in quality and weight, without any kind of marking. Tanneries then buy hides from slaughterhouses in different countries. So even if a tannery is based in France, you can't know for certain whether the leather you buy from it comes from a French organic cow or a sacred Indian cow, let alone what kind of farm that cow was raised on… And the situation isn't about to change: there are a few traceability trials under way, pushed mainly by the luxury industry (laser-marking hides, for example), but they are still a long way from being rolled out.

At this stage, the best we can do is make sure the hides used by the tannery come from Europe, or better still, from France. And push the meat and leather industry to set up a traceability system worthy of the name.

So that's where we stand on animal ethics. And from an environmental point of view, is leather really the most polluting material?

Does leather pollute more than the alternatives?

Greenhouse gases

When people talk about leather and pollution, they are mostly talking about the greenhouse gases from cattle farming. Rightly so: livestock accounts for 14.5% of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions⁹, and two-thirds of that comes from cattle. That's enormous, and it's mainly down to two things:

• First, cows burp methane, a gas with 28 times the warming power of CO2¹⁰
• To feed them, most farms use cereals (often imported). And growing cereals emits a lot of greenhouse gases, mainly because of fertiliser production, machinery and deforestation. Then there are the leftover nitrogen fertilisers: the surplus turns into nitrous oxide, a gas with a good side (it's laughing gas) and a bad side (it has 300 times the warming power of CO2).

But look a little closer and you realise that not all cows pollute in the same way. In Europe, the greenhouse gas emissions of a kilo of beef are 4 times lower than in South America or South Asia. For lots of reasons: grass in temperate regions is easier for cows to digest, so they emit less methane; deforestation stopped long ago; farms are very productive because the animals are healthy; most of the feed is grown on site, which avoids transport; and so on.

And even then, in Europe these greenhouse gas emissions are probably overestimated: the study doesn't take into account the fact that grassland absorbs part of the methane emitted by ruminants: 20 to 60% of emissions, according to the latest studies.

The question now is: does leather emit more or less greenhouse gas than its alternatives? To find out, let's look at a study by Ademe (the French government's environment agency, the reference on the subject), which compared the emissions of leather shoes with those of sports shoes and fabric shoes. And here comes the surprise:

Leather shoes emit less CO2 than the others! Odd, isn't it? Well, admittedly, there is an explanation: tanning leather takes less energy than spinning yarn, then weaving and dyeing a fabric, an industrial process that involves big machines that use a lot of electricity.

But in fact, we've just put our finger on a very touchy subject: what share of livestock farming's carbon footprint should be allocated to leather? In this study, Ademe uses a reference framework that allocates... 0% of the impact of livestock farming to leather. That can be justified by the reasoning we mentioned earlier: what determines how many cows are raised is milk and meat, so nothing would change if we stopped making leather. But we've already shown that this reasoning has its limits, so let's look at the European framework (the Product Environmental Footprint): it is based on the economic value of the hide and allocates 3.5% of the carcass's carbon footprint to leather, which seems closer to reality.

Using this figure (and the carbon emissions of European cows, which is where our leather would come from), we redid Ademe's calculations¹¹ of the carbon emissions of shoes (we've put them at this link), and here is what we got:

That completely changes the picture: the carbon footprint of leather shoes is twice as high as the others.

So on the face of it, we should give leather up... Except that when you analyse the environmental impact of a product, you have to look at its lifespan. And leather, provided it is properly cared for, holds up over time better than most other materials...

So let's assume we have well-made leather shoes and we make them last twice as long as the others. The carbon footprint would then be roughly the same for all three pairs:

In short, livestock farming worldwide is a huge problem for global warming because of its sheer volume, which urgently needs to come down. But European livestock farming is (a little) less of a problem, and if its leather is used to make products that genuinely last a long time, it can even end up greener than the alternatives.

And what about the rest?

Water consumption

You sometimes read “that it takes 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of meat”. For leather, you can also read “that it takes 17,000 litres of water to make a kilo of leather”. It's true that raising cattle uses water (just like raising a human, in fact): some for the animal to drink, but mostly to water the crops that will feed it.

But 93% of that water is just rain falling on the pasture (known as “green water”): it would have fallen on the meadow anyway, cows or no cows. In France, if you count only the water actually drawn and its impact on the environment, producing a kilo of meat takes just 315 litres of water (taken from groundwater or rivers, known as “blue water”).

But is 315 litres a lot or not? In fact, this blue water figure only means something when you compare it with the amount needed to produce the same number of calories from plants, and here is what you get according to this source:

You can see that beef does use quite a lot of water, but “only” twice as much as maize or soy, and far less than rice (if you've ever seen a paddy field…). So it's not nothing, but it's mainly a problem in regions under water stress: it matters more in India than in Norway, for example.

So once again, where the leather comes from is decisive. If it comes from a country with a temperate climate and little water stress, such as central or northern Europe, water is not a problem.

To be complete about the problems of livestock farming, we should also mention food security (it takes up 60% of the world's fertile land to produce only 18% of its calories), eutrophication (the infamous “green tides” of algae) and growing antibiotic resistance… They are one more reason to move away from factory farming, which is the main culprit. But let's leave livestock and look at tanning.

Pollution from tanning

Turning an animal hide into leather doesn't happen by itself: it takes a long process called “tanning”. Leather can be tanned the old-fashioned way, using vegetable tannins (in which case it's called vegetable tanning).  But since that process is rather slow (and therefore expensive), the most widely used method in the industry is tanning with chromium salts.

There's a catch: chrome tanning is faster, granted, but chromium residues are hazardous to health. Fortunately, for a leather product to be sold in Europe, it must contain a sufficiently low level of chromium. So as far as the health of European consumers goes, we can more or less relax (although, well…).

The problem is more on the production side. If it isn't treated, chromium pollutes the area right around the tanneries and poisons workers and local people. That's not an issue in Europe (thanks to EU directive 2000/60/EC, which regulates these practices), but it is in every leather-producing region with no protective regulation (in Morocco, but above all in Bangladesh and India).

In short, tanning leather is not an environmental problem if it's done in a European tannery, because the law requires it to protect its employees' health and treat its wastewater. On the other hand, it's a disaster if the leather comes from an Indian tannery that dumps its chromium residues in the Ganges.

Before we can wrap up on our use of leather, there's a third, hugely important subject to look at.

The social and societal side

There is one fundamental difference between animal leather and synthetic leather: the kind of industries and jobs each one relies on today. Just as we dug into how animal leather is produced, we looked at how synthetic leather is made. As a reminder, it covers two big families: faux leathers (“plastic” leather, such as “skai”) and so-called plant-based leathers (made from apple, pineapple or grape waste, for example).

To make these materials hard-wearing and waterproof, they go through more or less the same manufacturing process:

1 - A _{textile backing} is made, from polyamide for faux leathers or from plant waste for so-called plant-based leathers.

2- This textile is “coated” with a polyurethane resin to make it waterproof and hard-wearing.

Now of course, a textile base made from plant waste is brilliant: the best recycling imaginable, a kind of next-generation compost. The problem is that the polyurethane coating still makes up a big share of the material: 50% for Végéa (grape leather) or Apple Skin (apple leather), 42% for Pinatex (pineapple leather).

And polyurethane means petrochemicals, with oil extraction and refineries. Admittedly, you could try to “bio-source” this polyurethane by using plant biomass instead of oil. But for now, _{that only partly works}, mainly because of cost and quality problems. Besides, bio-based or not, making polyurethane takes a complex industrial process, in big chemical plants, to transform the raw materials.

Animal leather, on the other hand, needs no high technology or very complex industrial processes: you just raise cows and tan the hides, which we've known how to do (more or less well) for thousands of years.

In short, synthetic leather (for now) requires a high-tech world, whereas animal leather allows a low-tech one. A bit like comparing the production of a Tesla with that of a bicycle. What difference does it make? Quite a lot, actually:

• Low-tech favours human-scale businesses with local jobs, whereas high-tech imposes a complex, more globalised economic and industrial system. With animal leather, for example, we can choose to work with small farmers and medium-sized tanneries in France or Europe. For the polyurethane that synthetic leather needs, the world's main producers are BASF, Bayer, Dow Chemical… giant, ultra-globalised chemical companies, the same ones that feed the intensive farming system (hello, Bayer-Monsanto), and whose business models are largely responsible for the environmental crisis we're in today (we've already talked about it at length here).
• Low-tech means using less energy and fewer resources. You can produce animal leather with a meadow, a few cows and a small tannery. For synthetic leather, today, you inevitably need a big factory and machines, which use electricity, rare metals and so on.
• In low-tech, people are fully in control of their tools of production, whereas in high-tech, people lose their autonomy and can end up at the mercy of the technology. A farmer, for instance, can run their business from A to Z, from growing the feed to the slaughterhouse. In a highly industrial, globalised business, each person is just a small link in a much more complex chain, which can drain the meaning out of everyday work, or even be alienating in some cases.

Of course, we're not saying all high technology should go out of the window: we use it ourselves every day, starting with our computers. We just think that if you can get an acceptable level of comfort without high technology, it's better to do without it, given its downsides. In the same way that at Loom we would rather cycle to work than drive, today we prefer animal leather to synthetic leather.

There's also a very real short-term social question for livestock and arable farmers if we were to switch to synthetic leather. We saw earlier that stopping or reducing leather consumption could wipe out small family farms in favour of intensive agriculture.

And what would happen tomorrow if there were less livestock farming? Today, farming without animals is theoretically possible, granted, but it is still experimental. Almost every farm that rejects the industrial model currently uses animal manure. Without it, they would have to turn more to chemical fertilisers (made, as it happens, by the same big companies that supply the raw material for synthetic leather), which isn't desirable either. For a transition to small-scale farming without animals, such farms have to exist, set an example, spread and become the norm, and if that is going to happen, it will take a very, very long time.

So, in the end, is leather good or bad?

Here's a quick recap of what we've covered:

• Performance: leather offers a toughness, comfort and water resistance that are very hard to reproduce artificially in sneakers you wear all year round.
• Animal ethics: We know that, as things stand, it is impossible to guarantee livestock farming without animal suffering, but we think that in the short term, the best strategy for animal welfare is to get rid of factory farming and help small, extensive farms with responsible practices survive and grow. That means choosing leather produced in Europe and, in the medium term, pushing for a leather traceability system that would let us pick hides from the most responsible farms.
• Environmental pollution: livestock farming is certainly a very big contributor to greenhouse gases, but much less so in Europe. So provided 1- our leather is European and 2- the leather sneaker lasts at least twice as long as the others, it can emit fewer greenhouse gases than a fabric or synthetic sneaker.
• Social and societal side: every synthetic leather, including those made from plant waste, requires a complex industrial process, mainly because of the polyurethane. So today they are still heavily dependent on the oil and/or chemical industries, whose high-tech model strikes us as less desirable than that of traditional livestock farming and tanning, which supports an economy that is more local, more frugal and closer to human scale.

With leather, as with most of today's environmental problems, the poison is in the dose: we need to produce less, and better. For us, that means 1) making leather products that last as long as possible 2) choosing leather that is raised, tanned and assembled in Europe.

What does this mean for what comes next?

Our decision for our sneakers

For our sneakers, we have decided to use animal leather, on the following conditions:

• We choose cowhide. The lining of some shoes today is pigskin, and given current farming conditions, the odds that the pig didn't suffer are about the same as winning the lottery.
• We work with trusted tanneries in Portugal and Spain and use leather of European origin, which we can assume is more respectful of animal welfare and less polluting than the rest.
• We have done our best to make the sneaker last as long as possible, to lower the environmental impact of producing the leather. For example, we chose a non-recycled sole rather than a recycled one (which makes almost no difference to greenhouse gas emissions) because it can extend the lifespan of the whole sneaker by 30%. To make this sneaker even more durable, we have several leads to explore: a tougher sole (the main weak point of sneakers in general), _{better repairability}, advice on care, a change of colour (yes, everyone wears white leather sneakers, but let's admit it, they're not the easiest to keep clean…)

And after that?

We'll be keeping a close eye on plant-based synthetic leathers to see whether they move in the right direction: towards more toughness and comfort, less plastic, and more local, more low-tech production. If they get there, brilliant: we would be heading towards a less polluted world and a more resilient society, with no animal or human suffering. In that case, we'll happily give up animal leather.

But as we've seen, we're not there yet. So in the meantime, we'll do our best to overcome the two main weaknesses of animal leather:

1. Traceability: we will go as far back up the leather supply chain as we can, so as to guarantee that the hides come from traditional pasture-based farms with as little  animal suffering as possible. Our economic clout is very limited (our turnover is laughable next to the big brands'), but by writing articles like this one and raising the subject with everyone we deal with, we hope to help move the leather industry forward on traceability.
2. The lifespan of our leather products¹² : to be able to produce less, we have to make our products last as long as possible. Which is handy, because that's what we've been trying to do since Loom began.

As for our other products that could be made of leather, we'll decide case by case. For example, it seems clear to us that a leather patch on a pair of jeans is purely decorative, and that we should drop it. For belts and card holders, we may need to run comparative resistance tests against other natural materials before we decide.

And that's that

This question of leather is one of the hardest we've ever had to deal with, because it means reconciling four factors that sometimes pull in opposite directions: our well-being, animal ethics, environmental pollution, and the social and societal question. To answer the criticism we mentioned at the start of the article, it would have been far easier for us either to give up leather or to justify using it by saying it's just farm waste being put to good use. But the aim of this article is not to convince the sceptics of our ethical and environmental commitment (we're fairly sure we won't change their minds) but to understand the subject in depth, so as to make the choices with the smallest possible impact on the planet and on people. In short, to form our own opinion, and give you everything you need to form yours.

Written by Guillaume Declair

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PS: What can you do, at your own level, to minimise the impact of livestock farming?

If you want to be almost certain¹³ of causing no animal suffering at all, and you have the courage to do it, there is only one solution: go vegan, and drop leather, meat, dairy, fish and eggs. Otherwise, here is what you can do, at your own level, to minimise animal suffering and environmental pollution:

• Eat MUCH, MUCH less meat and dairy. France has committed to dividing its greenhouse gas emissions by 4. Applied to livestock farming, that means each of us dividing our consumption of meat, milk, yoghurt, cheese, eggs and so on by 4. So, roughly, going from 10 meals with meat a week to 2 or 3. And it will be a lot better for our health too.
• Only choose meat and dairy from small farms that respect animals and the environment. Since meat and milk make up by far the bulk of an animal's economic value, this is what will have the most impact if we want to see the end of factory farming and support small-scale farming.
• Push for change, for example by signing this Greenpeace petition to reform the Common Agricultural Policy in favour of small farms. Today, 1 farmer in 5 lives below the poverty line in Europe. The petition calls for European subsidies, which currently go to the most intensive farms, to be redirected towards more traditional ones.

When it comes to leather, you also have the power to change things:

• Keep your leather goods for much longer. To do that, buy good-quality leather, but above all, look after it like never before.
• Choose leather for uses where its comfort and toughness really come into their own. Yes to shoes, no to glasses cases, iPad covers or car seats.
• As far as possible, make sure both the leather and the tanning come from Europe. In any case, steer well clear of hides from countries such as Brazil (where cattle farming drives deforestation directly), India (where the conditions cows are raised and slaughtered in are horrific) or the United States (the specialists in factory farms and growth hormones).
• Pay the price. Just as a €5 t-shirt was almost certainly made in disastrous working conditions and at a high environmental cost, leather sneakers under €100 most likely contain poor-quality leather or leather produced in poor conditions. But stay alert all the same: an expensive leather product doesn't mean it was made well: you may be paying for the brand's margin, not the raw material.
• Buy second-hand leather. Better, but not perfect either: it can also open the door to more consumption of new leather (a bit like the way Vinted also drives the purchase of new clothes).

To go further, here are a few interesting resources that helped us write this article:

• The book Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer
• Several antispeciesist blogs (in French) such as Les questions composent, Les questions décomposent, Critical Vegan, K&M Les Veganautes, all of a very high editorial standard
• This long article by Michael Pollan, the American journalist behind the Netflix series Cooked, which traces his intellectual journey towards welfarism while reading Peter Singer in a steakhouse
• This opinion piece in Libération, a digest of the fallacious arguments against veganism

Who are we to say this? 
You're reading La Mode à l'Envers, a blog run by the clothing brand Loom. The textile industry is in a sorry state, and the planet is footing the bill. So whatever we manage to understand about this industry, we try to explain here. Because making clothes that last is good, but revealing, sharing and inspiring is even more powerful.
If you like what we write and want more, subscribe to our newsletter by clicking here. We promise: we write rarely and we never spam.

Footnotes

¹ The “fifth quarter” (hide and offal) accounts on average for only 8% of the sale price of a large bovine carcass, according to a study by Blézat Consulting commissioned by FranceAgriMer (the French agricultural products agency).

² What's more, animal suffering may be even greater for cows raised for their milk (dairy cows) than for those raised for meat (suckler cows), mainly because of the repeated pregnancies imposed on the cows and the separation of mother and calf.

³ And besides, eating habits changed enormously over the 20th century: before intensive farming was invented, people didn't eat meat every day. It was seen as a luxury, only within reach of the wealthiest. Granted, human life expectancy wasn't as good as it is today, but the ageing of the population owes more to hygiene measures than to meat on the menu every day.

⁴ If you remember your history and geography lessons, these were called two-field or three-field crop rotation systems.

⁵ Philosophically, welfarism is what's known as “preference utilitarianism”, which aims to maximise the satisfaction of living beings' preferences. Abolitionism, by contrast, is a “hedonistic utilitarianism”, which aims to maximise the well-being of individuals in absolute terms.

⁶ Removing all or part of an animal's horns: it is done so that cows don't injure each other, or the farmer.

⁷ See the chilling book “Steak Machine” by the journalist Geoffrey Le Guilcher, which recounts forty days working in a slaughterhouse.

⁸ We know this is an ideal to aim for, like a world without any human suffering or environmental pollution: there's little chance we'll get there, but that doesn't mean we should give up on the goal.

⁹ It is sometimes claimed that this is as much as the transport sector (14%), when in fact the two figures are obtained by different methods. The figure for livestock comes from the FAO and follows the life cycle assessment model, which includes the many facets of livestock farming. The figure for transport, which comes from the IPCC (Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report - IPCC), only counts the greenhouse gas emissions of vehicles on the road. Using the life cycle assessment method, that figure would be much higher.

¹⁰ Even though methane stays in the atmosphere for 12 years and CO2 for 100 years.

¹¹ In fact, Ademe also ran a sensitivity analysis based on the Product Environmental Footprint, but their result shows that it has almost no impact on the carbon footprint of the leather shoe: we really don't understand how that's possible! If anyone at Ademe would like to send us the methodology behind it, we're all ears...

¹² These two subjects are closely linked, by the way: farming conditions without animal suffering can only become the norm if overall consumption falls drastically. That is the only condition under which factory farming can one day disappear.

¹³ Even as a vegan, it's not impossible to cause animal suffering, because there is no guarantee that no animals were used to produce any given vegetable.