Leather Pipeline: it’s still from plastic that the main competition will come
Our penultimate Leather Pipeline market intelligence report for 2020 appears in the December 1 edition of Leatherbiz Weekly.
Most leather-making programmes for this challenging year are nearing their conclusion, the report says, and thoughts are turning to 2021.
It mentions new alternative materials to leather, but insists it’s too soon to say how much competition they will present to leather because it’s still not clear how well they can perform at scale and how much they will cost in the end.
Plastic materials present the real competition to leather, the report says. Brands that insist on using synthetic materials are making much of their use of recycled plastic, it said, adding: “The percentage of collected and recycled plastic is very disappointing. The vast majority of the plastic fibres will still end up in the ocean, in landfill or burned. This applies even in the most environmentally conscious countries.”
It concludes that there is still good potential for leather but that packers, raw material suppliers, chemical suppliers and tanners must be careful not to try to increase prices too steeply as there is a danger of “killing demand”.
