Originally published at: Watch: Vegan leather made out of mangoes | Boing Boing
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Mmmm…fruit leather.
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There are a lot of manual steps in creating this pleather. Sadly, they will not continue to smell like mango.
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For a long time I was wearing vegan leather belts. They wouldn’t last very long and would stretch or deform or fray. I found Truth Belts up in Canada that makes vegan belts with the same material the Amish use for their horse reins, and it’s night and day.
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Plastic with mango pulp in it?
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What is it?
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As a precocious kid on a visit to east Africa, I decided to climb on a rather tempting mango tree with excellent branch structure. A few hours later I swelled up and became somewhat mango shaped, particularly about the face and arms. I seriously hope that the process used to render these fruit does away with the rather potent blend of urushiol oil that the trees are known for.
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Polyester/Vinyl…It’s held up from daily use over a few years.
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Um… that would be regular leather.
The Amish people are not, in general, vegan or vegetarian. The horse tack they make and sell is of the standard leather variety. No idea what weird flex this Truth Belts company is trying to pull.
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So now we’ll have “leather flies”.
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That’s what I thought as well and why I was asking. Disappointing that it would be polyester and not some amazing traditional material I hadn’t heard about before
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Related: this material made of orange peels
Pretty interesting.
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The Truth belt ad mentions that their polyester belts are used by Mennonite, not Amish, so there’s that. But they plant a tree for every belt sold!
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Polyester is an amazing traditional material for some:
Polyesters occurring in nature include the cutin component of plant cuticles which consists of omega hydroxy acids and their derivatives, interlinked via ester bonds, forming polyester polymers of indeterminate size. So technically vegan polyester.
Polyesters are also produced by bees in the genus Colletes , which secrete a cellophane-like polyester lining for their underground brood cells earning them the nickname “polyester bees”.
(I looked into possible sources for sustainable building materials, especially for thermal insulation, a while back. Still a long way off, state of the art comes down to wool or plant fibres of one sort or another.)
Also, synthetic polymers go back round about 100 years now.
I understand in some parts of the world that’s old enough to count as traditional
Irrelevant side note 1:
“Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people!”
Irrelevant side note 2:
This one time I managed to convince a fellow student that polyester was made from a certain kind of beetle by melting down their exoskeleton. You know, kinda like Campari was originally coloured with carmine dye, derived from crushed cochineal insects.
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I made my wallet from a rubberised cotton fabric that I really love (it’s no longer sold where I bought it, though AFAIK you could get something similar from any technical fabric seller). (I suspect Jo-Ann wouldn’t have this sort of thing though).
It’s been in a pocket with my keys for a decade and still going strong, but the best part is that it wears even more interestingly than leather. It starts out matt grey, then quickly gets a leatherlike black satin surface, and after many years you start to see the light plain-woven mesh, though it’s still hard-wearing even then. You wouldn’t mistake it for leather, and you work it in different (easier) ways, but it shows how a good replacement is better than a shoddy fake, which is what most pleather is.
Unfortunately I don’t know of such a good general-purpose replacement for thick “structural” leather like you see in shoes or saddlery.
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if any fruit to be used for leather like product i thought avacodos would be at the top of the list.
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Another material that wears in like leather (besides waxed cotton, which is a material I love) is Deutschleder. Despite its name it is not actually leather but a heavy, tightly woven canvas fabric closely related to moleskin and cord. It’s an old workwear fabric that is pretty much impossible to find these days except as part of the traditional workwear of German carpenters (and a few other traditional, wandering journeyman accepting craft associations or Zünfte).
I’ve always wanted a Deutschleder jacket but I am not going to walk around in Zunftkleidung which would not only look weird but also be something akin to stolen valour.
Maybe I’ll buy this jacket one day, which is the only one I could find that isn’t a traditional Zunft cut
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If this truly is hard-wearing, I wonder if Birkenstock would be interested. They like to promote their vegan alternatives.
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Disappointing that they never said what the multiple layers of laminate that are added to the fruit leather are made from. It seems like the mango acts like fiberglass, but some other material is the resin in this product. They must not be proud of what that material is, so they avoided mention.
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Mango fruit leather is one of the most delicious things ever. Not very durable, though you could make shoes or belts out of it at a push. These people are making plastic out of mangoes, though, which demands the question “why is that better?”
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