Mike Redwood
Columnist
International Leather Maker
Most of us in the UK value the long-term continuity that the Royal Family represents, a counterpoint to the speed at which politicians come and go. Last Friday, we were reminded of another form of continuity in the life of the naturalist and television broadcaster, Sir David Attenborough.
He is still making the wildlife and nature programmes that have defined his career; he celebrated his 100th birthday, or more precisely, we all did, given how much his work has shaped our collective understanding of the natural world.
Across his long career, camera and broadcast technologies have advanced to reveal more and more of the true lives of animals, insects and plants. This has repeatedly drawn him back to subjects previously impossible to film. Blue Planet II, broadcast in 2017, was a defining moment, when millions first grasped the scale of marine plastic pollution and its impact on marine wildlife. The images were memorable, but the underlying message was more subtle and more important: materials do not disappear. They persist, they move and, in some cases, they accumulate in ways their original designers never imagined.
Plastic is an extraordinary invention, but its price has never reflected its full environmental cost. Underpriced and under-regulated, it has entered far too many sectors of our lives without sufficient thought to its long-term fate. By contrast, leather has evolved over tens of thousands of years, adapting to societal and technical change while remaining, at its core, a stable and recognisable material.
Persistence and accumulation
Attenborough helped bring the reality of persistence into living rooms around the world. In Blue Planet II, he notes that “in some parts of the oceans it is estimated that there are now over one million pieces of plastic for every square mile. And we are beginning to discover how seriously that affects marine life”. Marine scientists often use apex predators such as whales and dolphins to illustrate biomagnification – the tendency of persistent pollutants to concentrate as they move up the food chain.
This is a reminder that persistence is not an abstract concept. It is a measurable property with consequences over time and space. It would be naïve to claim that leather and its manufacture have no connection to this broader question. Historically, aspects of leather production, finishing chemistries, water repellents, biocides, have shared features with the families of long-lasting compounds now under scrutiny in many sectors.
At the same time, the leather industry has already undergone a significant transition. Over recent decades, tanners and their supply chains have moved away from many long-chain fluorinated compounds, strengthened chemical management and aligned with frameworks that prioritise reduced persistence and safer alternatives. ZDHC’s Roadmap to Zero and the Leather Working Group’s audit standards now set shared expectations on chemical use, effluent quality and wastewater management for tanneries worldwide. This is progress grounded in science and day‑to‑day practice, not simply in rhetoric.
Microplastics and material fate
Recent work on ocean pollution suggests that while large items of plastic from bottles, bags or packaging to fishing gear make up most of the mass, the overwhelming number of particles are microplastics smaller than 5mm. These originate from sources including synthetic textiles, tyre wear and the fragmentation of larger plastic items.
Public debate has rightly focused on microplastics. Fashion’s role in this story is no longer confined to polyester fleece in washing machines. Polyester dominates textile microplastic flows because of its volume and falsely low cost, but polyurethane (PU) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) also matter when they are used for faux leather and coated fabrics. PU-based materials abrade and crack with wear; PVC additionally suffers from UV degradation. Both can fragment into persistent plastic particles and may release additives of concern, particularly in the case of PVC.
Tanners know from experience that PU and PVC-based leather alternatives shed during normal use, especially in footwear, bags and upholstery, and that once these materials peel or flake they are essentially impossible to repair. These fragments are irregular particles rather than fibres, and current waste systems are not designed to capture them effectively. The evidence base for the exact scale of these specific microplastics is still developing, but the direction of travel is clear: attention is broadening from “microfibres only” to “all microplastics from synthetic textiles, coatings and composites”.
Leather, often simplistically labelled “natural”, does not always sit neatly on the other side of this line. Modern leather is frequently finished, coated or combined with synthetic components. These layers can influence how it performs at end of life. The more useful question, therefore, is not “natural versus synthetic”, but: what persists, what fragments and what accumulates – and under what conditions?
Waste, value and circularity
Where leather has a particularly strong and distinctive position is in its relationship to waste. The plastics problem highlighted in Blue Planet II is, at its core, a failure of a linear system: production, consumption and leakage into the environment.
Leather operates differently. It transforms a low‑value byproduct of the meat and dairy industries into a durable, high‑value material. Remove leather from that equation and the hides do not vanish; they move into other waste streams, with associated emissions and disposal issues.
This is not an invitation to complacency. It is, however, a reminder that leather already embodies important elements of circular economy thinking, long before the phrase entered corporate slide decks. The challenge now is to deepen and extend that circular logic, not to abandon it in favour of simplistic material bans or easy marketing labels.
Water and end-of-life
If there is one area where Attenborough’s ocean narrative connects directly with tanning, it is water. The ocean is not a distant abstraction. It is the endpoint of rivers, estuaries and discharge systems across the world. Every industrial process has downstream consequences.
The sector has made substantial advances in wastewater treatment: higher chromium exhaustion and recovery, significant reductions in COD and BOD, and more systematic chemical management. ZDHC has created a common language on restricted substances and wastewater limits for the fashion supply chain, while the Leather Working Group has become a global reference point for auditing environmental performance in tanneries. It is technically correct to say that tanning uses water rather than permanently consuming it, but that must not distract from the fact that it is the quality of what is discharged that matters.
The gap between best practice and global reality remains significant, and it is here, more than in simple comparisons with plastics, that the leather industry’s environmental credibility will be judged. We must support pulling those failing up and prosecute those who refuse to start the process.
Perhaps the most important lesson from Blue Planet II is that end-of-life can no longer be treated as an afterthought. Plastics shocked the public because they do not readily disappear. Leather’s story is more nuanced. Untreated collagen will biodegrade; tanned leather does so too, but more slowly, and the outcome depends on chemistry and conditions. Add coatings, laminates, foams and other composite constructions, and the picture becomes more complex.
If leather is to differentiate itself from synthetics, it needs to think more holistically about the entire journey from raw hide to end-of-life, rather than relying on heavy finishes to conceal natural variation. Heavily coated leathers may hide a scratch and look more uniform, but they often sacrifice the qualities that make leather special – its ability to wear in over time rather than wear out, to develop character with the owner.
From observation to responsibility
Over the past century, Attenborough has shown that natural systems are interconnected and that the consequences of human activity can manifest far from their point of origin and long after the initial decisions are taken. For leather, the implication is clear. Materials are not defined solely by origin or by performance in use. They are defined by their fate: how they persist, where they travel and what they become.
There is a strong story to tell. Leather is rooted in byproduct utilisation, long service life and increasingly careful process control. Credibility, however, will depend on acknowledging complexity as well as progress and on recognising that persistence, in all its forms, is both a strength and a responsibility.
If Attenborough’s century teaches anything, it is that time reveals what short-term thinking conceals. The task for our industry is to ensure that, when viewed over that longer horizon, leather stands not only for quality and craftsmanship, but for a material system that understands, and actively takes responsibility for, its place in the wider world.
mike@internationalleathermaker.com
You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.
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