MYGIRAFFE LIFESTYLE PRIVATE LIMITED

In their own words

Leather production kills 1.4 billion animals in a year globally. Every year, the global leather industry slaughters more than a billion animals and tans their skins and hides. Many of these animals endure all the horrors of factory farming—including extreme crowding and confinement, deprivation, and unanesthetized castration, branding, and tail-docking—as well as cruel treatment during transport and slaughter. Although leathermakers like to tout their products as “biodegradable” and “eco-friendly,” the process of tanning actually stops the leather from biodegrading by stabilizing the collagen or protein fibers. Until the late 1800s, animal skin was air- or salt-dried and tanned with vegetable tannins or oil, but today, animal skin is turned into finished leather with a variety of much more dangerous substances, including formaldehyde, coal-tar derivatives, mineral salts, and various oils, dyes, and finishes, some of which are cyanide-based. Most leather produced around the world is chrome-tanned. The Environmental Protection Agency considers all wastes containing chromium to be hazardous. In addition to the toxic substances mentioned above, tannery effluent also contains large amounts of other pollutants, such as protein, hair, salt, lime sludge, sulfides, and acids. A chrome-tanning facility wastes nearly 15,000 gallons of water and produces up to 2,200 pounds of “solid waste” (e.g., hair, flesh, and trimmings) for every ton of hides that it processes. Raising animals for food and leather creates waste and pollution. Huge amounts of fossil fuels are consumed in livestock production: It takes about 35 calories of fossil fuel to make one calorie of beef and 68 calories of fossil fuel to make one calorie of pork. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that the typical American diet (nearly 30 percent of which comes from animal sources) generates the equivalent of nearly 3,300 pounds more carbon dioxide per person per year than a vegan diet with the same number of calories. When the milk production of cows in the dairy industry declines, their skin is made into leather. The hides of their calves, who are frequently raised for veal, are made into high-priced calfskin. The economic success of slaughterhouses and dairy farms is directly linked to the sale of leather goods. Trees are cut down to create pastureland, vast quantities of water are used, and run-off from feedlots and dairy farms is a major source of water pollution. A California study found that a single cow on a dairy farm “emits 19.3 pounds of volatile organic compounds per year, making dairies the largest source of the smog-making gas, surpassing trucks and passenger cars.” According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, tanneries have largely shifted operations worldwide from developed to undeveloped nations, where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are lax. As a startup we want to substitute leather in the fashion industry in bags, shoes, belts and apparel. We believe if great substitutes exist the consumer will not ask for or look for leather and that will cause the leather industry to die and also prevent killing of animals, pollution and risk to human health.

Written by the company on its public Startup India profile. Not verified by us.