I’m in need of a new belt, my current belt looking like it’ll break at the point it buckles. So I decided to find the most Earth-friendly leather-substitute. That seems to be mycelium, a material made from mushrooms. OK, fine, I google for a mycelium belt.
What do I get? Not sites that sell mycelium belts. I did however, get four or five links to sites selling pictures of such belts. Not the belts themselves, just pictures.
So anyone know where I can buy such a belt?
That’s because it’s mostly just a concept.
Here is a serious web site talking about it:
Note that article was from 6 years ago and they still don’t have it for sale in their store.
I do find reports of people who have sold “mycelium” or “mushroom leather” belts, but they are mostly plastic with a little bit of mushroom mixed in as a gimmick. It’s not nearly durable enough to actually work in practice. If you want a natural, vegan, Earth-friendly leather substitute, cork belts exist and are really easy to find.
Sure, if you don’t mind peeling the bark off of a helpless cork oak tree.
Just kidding. It reportedly does not harm the tree.
I was looking at cork belts too while trying to find mycelium belts, some look pretty nice. They’re lightweight (almost half as heavy as leather), resist water and scratches, and seem to last as long as a leather belt would last for me. (3 years or so.)
I didn’t even know they exist before trying to look up a mushroom belt, and now I think my next belt is going to be a cork one.
You might want to give synthetic materials another look. On the one hand, my belt is made of synthetic materials, which are in some sense non-renewable… but on the other hand, it’s like 20 years old. A “non-renewable” belt that lasts for decades might actually be more eco-friendly than a “renewable” one that lasts for a couple of years.
Excellent point.
I just ordered a cork belt. I expect it’s actually cork put around some other material, probably plastic. Cork isn’t really strong enough to endure the rigors that belts undergo.
Maybe you could settle for a Mycenaean belt?
Try a paracord belt. Very strong, pretty cheap, and in an emergency could be handy.
Oh, yes, there is definitely something to be said for Cordura, Dyneema, etc.
In my experience, paracord is 100% Nylon, a decent choice, whether woven out of actual small-diameter cord or not. Polyester is also an option. At the end of the day, you also want it to look nice, but one is hardly lacking for choice of durable synthetic materials. I think a kevlar webbing belt would last a few years.
Why not leather? It’s essentially a useful industrial byproduct, and probably isn’t materially contributing to much pollution in its own right, at least when compared to the meat industry.
Not as Earth-friendly as is often assumed:
If the concern is how Earth-friendly the belt is, how about a leather belt but a used one purchased from a vintage clothing or Goodwill store?
Sure, but that’s a sunk cost, for lack of a better term. The carbon emissions from cattle raising are happening whether or not the hides get used or thrown in a landfill, because people want to eat the cows. Another way to look at it is that demand for leather is NOT driving the raising and slaughter of cattle. That’s beef production that does that. The article’s authors assume that because leather is valuable, that it’s not a byproduct. That’s incorrect- what makes it a byproduct isn’t its value, it’s whether or not it’s what is driving production. And in this case, the primary reason is beef. Which makes everything else byproducts, from tallow, to bones, to leather.
Put differently, that cow was raised and died for beef. Whatever CO2 emissions were incurred for that cow, they happened in the process of beef raising, and would have happened regardless of whatever they did with the hide. So you may as well use it. And if you manage to find an alternative that isn’t zero emissions, you’re actually adding extra CO2 above and beyond the emissions for the cow’s beef.
I can’t see the article without signing up for Vox but ISTM that it is possibly a question of how one accounts?
First off, people can choose to avoid using animal products for lots of reasons, this is just questioning the GHG footprint reason one.
To me the question is first whether or not demand for leather in any way drives cow production and slaughter? If demand for leather marginally grew would more hides come to market? If it collapsed would fewer cows get slaughtered? If food demand completely drives production numbers then leather is a byproduct and using it is the GHG costs difference between leather production vs disposal of the hides by incineration or whatever. And incineration produces lots of GHG.
IOW is @bump right?
And how much GHG does tanning etc incur?
Eating less beef on the other hand definitely matters significantly.
Again lots of other reasons for people to prefer to not wear dead animal.
Okay I just did a Claude question on this and its answer here is interesting: incineration is very GHG costly but landfill not so much so. The tanning process OTOH is an industrial event with lots of energy and other inputs and outputs that have climate impacts. So creating leather is a cost above just tossing the hide in a capped landfill.
So next step is to know how much GHG the non-animal product creates and add up both suedes … I mean sides. 
Also, the demand for leather isn’t the primary driver of cow production, but it surely has at least some effect. If you raise a cow and slaughter it, you can sell the meat, and you can also sell the hide. The meat has most of the value, but the hide still has some. So there have to be some marginal cases where it wouldn’t be worth it just for the meat, but would be for the meat plus hide.
Of course, calling the leather a free byproduct, while inaccurate, is still closer to accurate than pinning all of the cost of cattle-raising on the leather.
It really seems the margin is virtually zero. The meat drives almost all of the carcass value. Enough so that it seems at least 15% of hides are discarded rather than processed as it is.
There are lots of industrial byproducts that have tremendous value. But they’re not what’s driving the industry that creates the byproducts.
Another example might be molasses and rum. Molasses is the literal byproduct of white sugar refining, and it’s used for a variety of uses- straight as a flavoring, and as the primary fermentable input into the production of rum.
But with the exception of French Caribbean style cane juice rums (agricoles) nobody is raising sugarcane and processing it into white sugar for the sake of producing rum. They’re growing it for sugar, and the molasses is something left over that rum producers use.
Same with whey used in various protein shakes, drinks, and powders. It’s a byproduct of cheese making. Glycerin as used in myriad cosmetics is a byproduct of soap making. The key thing here is that people are going to make sugar, cheese, and soap, regardless of whether others make rum, protein powder, and glycerin out of what’s left over. And any environmental costs incurred in the production of those byproducts are rightly attributed to the primary product, not the byproduct. Anything incurred in further finishing/refining/distilling/etc… those byproducts should be attributed to the byproduct.
I didn’t mean to imply that it was free, instead what I was trying to get at is that they (the meat producers) are going to slaughter those cows regardless of what the hides can be used for, because they want the meat. So all the carbon emissions and environmental unfriendliness incurred in the raising of those cows is laid at the feet of the meat industry, not the leather industry. The only emissions that can fairly be attributed to the leather industry are those of the actual tanning and finishing of the hides and transporting it to where it’s used in a finished good.
From a quick Google, it looks like the meat of a cow is worth around $6000, while the hide is around $120, or 1/50th of that. So at a rough estimate, it might be fair to count 2% of the environmental impact of the cow in the leather’s account. Yeah, it’s not much.