Fruit Leather vs Animal Leather
At SOLEMNIKO, there are many choices that are made by Alexandra to ensure that the brand stays aligned with slow living, sustainable and ethical practices. One of these choices is to do with the leather that is used in the Atelier. Not only is this leather used for covering notebooks, it’s also used for toolkits, pencil cases and bookmarks. And it is made entirely from wasted mangoes.
The statistics of the animal leather industry are enough to sicken anyone who looks into it. Not only are the billions of animals farmed for the meat sector being used, but there is also a specific cycle of breeding animals just for their skins. These animals experience all the horrors of factory farming with overcrowding to abuse and extreme cruelty in transport and slaughter conditions. Something which Alexandra is strongly against and wishes to be part of the movement to stop such practices being commonplace in commercial fields.
Alexandra knew when she began SOLEMNIKO that she could not support such an industry, that so many animals across the world are already suffering - she would not make any more suffer for her own business’ profit. That meant steering clear of using animal leather and any other animal-based materials and setting out to find an alternative.
It is never easy to find something that goes against the status quo. Something that is new, original, cruelty-free and - gods forbid - actually helping to decrease the waste of the human race rather than increase it. While doing research for another brand on new materials, Alexandra stumbled across Fruitleather Rotterdam and instantly fell in love not only with the product but also with the ethos and story.
Fruitleather Rotterdam was created in response to the horrific waste of the food industry, and the terrible practices of the animal leather industry. I for one am relieved they did. There are of course other companies doing the same thing with different starting products.
In Mexico there is Desserto made from Cactus plants, founded by two friends who wanted to combat the environmental damage created from the traditional leather industry. In Italy there is Apple Leather and MuSkin from Grade Zero Espace, from Spain you have Dr Carmen Hijosa’s Pineapple Leather Pinatex, in Thailand you have Tree Tribe’s Leaf Leather, in South India there is Malai which creates coconut leather. There is also Cork Leather, which is 100% vegan and very sustainable. All of these alternatives, and more, were created with the wish to combat the issues seen in an industry that takes not only lives but also huge amounts of resources.
So, where does the future of leather lay? My guess is in these much more ethical alternatives. SOLEMNIKO’s success lays with the success of the natural environment, and because of this no products sold from SOLEMNIKO will be created from animal leather. There are circumstances where - if animal leather which has already been used was going to waste, I would up-cycle it. However this would be made clear in any schpiel written about the product.
Animal leather is far more dense, it rarely has a ‘backing’ panel on it which means that the fluff that is almost like suede is actually the untreated skin. Not the nicest thought. It’s also more expensive to buy, causes a bigger carbon footprint and is generally not going to score well on the ethics scale.
Our future as a species lies in using our creative abilities to make more ethical material options so that the world can thrive alongside us. We are in a symbiotic relationship with our world and the other beings which inhabit it - it is a shame that so many still do not understand this.