France’s main leather industry body, the Conseil National du Cuir (CNC), has run a social media campaign this autumn to combat common fallacies about a material that it presents as having been an excellent example of sustainability for 70,000 years.

In one of the presentations, it smashes the myth that farmers raise cattle for their hides. “This is a false idea,” CNC says in a short video. “The leather sector obtains hides and skins from the food industry and transforms them into quality finished products, but if the leather industry did not exist hides weighing 170,000 tonnes would be thrown away in France every year.”

To make the point more graphically, it pointed out that this would be the equivalent in weight to 24 Eiffel Towers.

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