Is it Leather writes on LinkedIn: When conversations about sustainability turn to beef, most people think about burgers, steaks, and protein. Rarely does the discussion extend to what happens to the rest of the animal. Yet there’s a critical opportunity being missed: real leather. If you eat beef, the most sustainable and responsible choice you can make is to choose real leather over plastic substitutes that only pretend to be greener.

The scale of beef consumption makes this point clear:
🍔 273 million burgers are eaten every single day.
🍔 It takes about 273,000 cows to provide that meat – meaning there are 273,000 hides available for use – a resource that already exists whether we use it or not.
🍔 Those hides can become 1.6 million durable leather products.
🍔 By using those hides, we prevent 7.6 billion kilograms of waste from being dumped into landfills.

hat’s sustainability at its finest – using what we already have instead of creating new demand for fake plastic leather and its environmentally devastating fossil fuels.

Many people are drawn to “vegan leather” or “faux leather,” believing it’s the responsible choice. But the truth is that fake leather is just plastic. It’s made from polyurethane or PVC, both petroleum-based materials. Their production pollutes water, emits toxins, and leaves behind microplastics that persist for centuries. Worse, these products usually have a short lifespan – cracking, peeling, and ending up in landfills where they never truly go away. By contrast, real leather is a natural material. It is strong, repairable, long-lasting, and biodegradable at the end of its life. Instead of filling landfills, it often gets passed down through generations.

Leather represents a working model of the circular economy. Beef production creates hides as a by-product, and those hides can be transformed into goods that last decades. If we don’t use the hides, they’re simply wasted, burned, or buried – while consumers are pushed toward synthetic plastics to fill the gap. Choosing leather keeps billions of kilograms of needless waste out of the ground and reduces reliance on fossil fuels.

Think about the last leather product you bought – maybe a belt, bag, or shoes. Chances are you still own it, and chances are it still works. Real leather gets better with age, developing character instead of falling apart. That durability means fewer replacements, less waste, and a smarter use of resources.

The bottom line is simple: eating beef produces hides whether we use them or not. By choosing real leather, we keep billions of kilograms of waste out of landfills, reduce plastic consumption, and honor the principle of sustainability by making the most of what already exists. If you eat the burger, don’t waste the hide. That is true sustainability in action.