Most vegan leather is petroleum-based — even the eco pineapple, apple, mushroom, and cactus versions that promised to disrupt the industry.
Over the course of about two years, the companies that set out to make a genuinely better leather ran out of money. MycoWorks opened a 136,000-square-foot factory in Union, South Carolina, in the fall of 2023 to grow mushroom leather at commercial scale, then closed the plant two years later and shifted from manufacturing the material to licensing its technology, with chief executive Matt Scullin describing the decision as a “pivotal moment for MycoWorks and the future of the mycelium materials industry.” Bolt Threads, the maker of the mushroom-based Mylo and a company backed by Stella McCartney and more than $300 million in funding, had already paused Mylo globally in 2023. Ananas Anam, which turned pineapple-leaf fiber into the material known as Piñatex, headed toward liquidation in late 2025. The next-generation materials meant to replace both animal hide and plastic all contracted at nearly the same moment, which leaves the category they were built to improve on close to where it began: dominated by plastic.
The founders who ran those companies describe the same wall, and it was rarely a lack of interest. Dan Widmaier, the chief executive of Bolt Threads, told Sourcing Journal that demand was never the problem. “Mylo is a great product — our customers love it, I love it,” he said. “But we’re talking about millions of square meters, which is a very different challenge. And we didn’t see a way to do that…without access to the public markets.” The obstacle was more basic than marketing or margins. “Problem No. 1 is making this stuff,” he said, arguing that even with hundreds of millions of investment dollars in the sector, there remained “a big mismatch in the understanding of what’s required to bring deep technology solutions to the market in a way that works for everybody.”
What’s really in vegan leather?
The material behind most vegan leather is not a plant or fungus but a polymer — typically polyurethane (PU) or polyvinyl chloride (PVC) coatings bonded to fabric backings. There are benefits, like water resistance and cheap prices, but these are also petroleum-derived plastics. For a company looking to replace animal hides for ethical reasons, plastic helps do the job. But plastic production is heavily tied to environmental issues; it’s responsible for 3.4 percent to 5.3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — more than double the aviation sector. The synthetic-leather market was valued at roughly $45 billion in 2025 and is projected to more than double by 2033, with polyurethane its dominant material. “Vegan” leather has done a great deal to make an oil-derived product read as an environmental one, a shift the New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi traced in 2022, when she described the rebranding of plastic leather to vegan as a “marketing masterstroke” meant to suggest environmental value.
And, for the most part, it worked.
The alternatives that sound like a real escape from petroleum mostly are not. Pineapple, apple, and cactus leathers all rely on plastic to bind their plant fibers into something durable enough to sell. The leather trade body Leather UK, estimates that apple leather runs 50 to 75 percent plastic and the cactus-based Desserto, which has appeared on designer bags and in luxury vehicles, is about 65 percent polyurethane. Those figures come from an industry with a stake in the answer, but they track with the independent testing.
The confusion runs close to industry-wide. In a Business of Fashion investigation, the publication reported that “the majority of leather alternatives currently on the market are simply variations on conventional plastic,” and noted that the nonprofit Textile Exchange had recommended brands stop using the word leather for anything not made from animal skin. Sydney Gladman, then chief scientific officer at the Material Innovation Initiative, described a field still finding its footing. “It’s a brand new space. It’s very rogue right now, everyone’s out doing their own thing,” she said. “Brands don’t really know how to sell [these new materials] while being transparent and truthful.” Suzanne Lee, the founder of the consultancy Biofabricate, cautioned against the vague promise the labels make. “Just that idea of ‘better,’ it’s woolly,” she said. “What we don’t need is another generation of materials that in another 10 years we discover are no better… or have unforeseen impacts, either in the way they degrade or in use.”
The durability problem
The most neutral assessment came from the FILK Freiberg Institute, whose researchers ran leather and nine alternatives through standardized testing and published the results in the journal Coatings in 2021. The conclusion left little room for interpretation: “none of the leather alternatives showed the universal performance of leather.” On tensile strength, leather measured 39.5 newtons per square millimeter, the highest of everything tested, against 20.8 for Desserto, 14 for the apple-based Appleskin, 4.5 for Piñatex, and 0.2 for the mushroom material Muskin. When agricultural byproducts were mixed into a polymer layer, the study found, the plant content rose but the material gained no measurable advantage over the plastic it was meant to improve on.
That weakness carries an environmental cost at the end of the product’s life. A coated bag that cracks and peels sheds microplastics as it breaks down, and because the plant-based versions still contain plastic beneath the surface, they cannot be composted either. Other research found that some plant-based vegan leather products have reported lifespans of as little as two years, which means the material sold as the greener choice can reach a landfill sooner than the hide it was meant to replace.
For a period, the industry’s own measurement tools made the plastic option look responsible. In 2022 the Sustainable Apparel Coalition paused the consumer-facing version of its Higg Index after the Times reported that the scoring system favored synthetic materials made from fossil fuels, and after Norway’s consumer authority warned the retailers H&M and Norrøna that environmental claims built on Higg data were misleading. The index accounted for the impact of raising an animal to produce leather but not for the impact of extracting the oil behind its plastic competitor, which weighted the comparison before it began.
The leather industry sees the same rebrand as its own grievance. Dr. Kerry Senior, director of Leather UK, argues that the terminology misleads shoppers and undercuts genuine hide at once. “Terms like ‘vegan leather,’ for example, create confusion and erode consumer trust in the fashion industry,” he wrote in The Drum. He also presses the byproduct case for animal leather: “As long as people eat meat, leather will exist. If we didn’t use those hides, they’d simply be thrown away. Leather goods then last for decades (including second-hand purchases and reuse) and decompose organically. And yet, somehow we’re still seen as the animal-killing, less sustainable choice.” His is an interested voice, but the underlying point, that durability and end-of-life belong in any honest comparison, is the same one the independent researchers make.
Luke Haverhals, who founded Natural Fiber Welding to make a plastic-free material called Mirum, argues that the labeling is where shoppers are misled. “We cannot stress enough that your readers should be very skeptical when they read about materials and products that are marketed as ‘plant-based,'” he told Vegconomist. He says consumers need to be asking hard questions about what other materials are being utilized. “‘Pineapple’ and ‘apple’ leather products, for example, are often glued together with polyurethane and therefore do not appear truly circular or transparent,” he noted.
The failures of the past two years expose how hard the underlying problem actually is. Making a material as durable as leather without either an animal or a barrel of oil has proven far more difficult than the marketing implied, and the genuinely plastic-free options that remain, such as Natural Fiber Welding’s Mirum, are still small, costly, and slow to scale. Until that changes, most of what reaches shelves under a vegan label will keep being a petroleum product, no matter the word in front of it suggests.
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