WHY plant-based material
By now all of us know that ''The Amazon is the Lungs of the Earth''
It means that the Amazon is home to 200 million cattle - not Logging but cattle.
Cattle ranching is the largest driver of Amazon deforestation.
450,000 sq.km. of Brazil rain forest now is pasture, for comparison, Germany is 350,000 sq.km. UK is 240,000 sq.km.
It is often said that a piece of a hamburger is a piece of the Amazon.
20% of the Amazon has been destroyed. An area the size of the UK is lost every year, although sometimes are much higher.
72 billion animals are slaughtered every year
1/3 of a million tons of fish are caught each year for cattle feed.
1/3 of all crop land is required for animal feed.
By 2025 the demand for meat will rise by 33% to 40% estimated.
Leather production - it is argued that the skin is a by-product of the meat industry. They argued that environmentally, the tanning industry is simply converting a product that would -otherwise go to landfill. From an environmental view (not Vegan) this argument is valid were is not for the tremendous environmental harm the tanning industry causes worldwide.
Chromium-tanned leather is the most popular form of producing leather these days, and one of the most noxious. It relies on a toxic slush of Chromium salts and tanning liquor.
Even in fully MODERNIZED TANNERIES it is nearly impossible to reclaim all the pollutants generated by the tanning processing
As a rule of thumb, tanning one ton of hide typically results in 20 to 80 cubic meters of waste water with Chromium concentrations around 250 mg/L and Sulphide concentrations at roughly 500 mg/L, not to mention the offal effluence from the preparation phase and the pesticides often added to keep mould growth down during transportation to the facility.
70% of an untreated hide is eventually discarded as a solid waste - the hair, fat, meat, sinew, all goes straight into a landfill. Wastewater pollution is primarily a by-product of the initial preparation stage, wherein bits of flesh, hair, mould, excrement and other animal by-products are mixed into wash water and discarded.
''The leather city of the world''
For example, Kanpur, India - the self proclaimed ''Leather City of the World'' this city once housed more than 10,000 tanneries which, in 2003, were dumping more than 22 tons of effluence into the Ganges river everyday. The city acted in 2009, sealing 49 of the highest-polluting tanneries in town - out of a list of 404 heavy polluters.
The Hazaribagh neighborhood
The Hazaribagh neighborhood of the capital city Dhaka was rated as one of the five most toxic, heavily polluted sites on the entire planet by the Blacksmith Institute.
Cow-derived leather has almost three times the negative environmental impact as its synthetic counterparts, including polyurethane (PU) leather.
Leather has the greatest impact on eutrophication, a serious ecological problem in which runoff waste creates an overgrowth of plant life in water systems.
around 80% of leather world wide is tanned using chrome
The Indian leather industry releases large amounts of toxic chemicals and acidic effluents concentrated with heavy metal Chromium, Cadmium, Lead, Arsenic, Cobalt, Copper, Iron, Zinc, Manganese. All these highly potent chemicals make their way into Ganges.