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Why leather is more sustainable for car interiors than you think

Leather has long been considered a luxury material for car interiors, but in recent times there have been a number of trends promoting more “sustainable” approaches to trim options on the market. car.

Some auto brands have marketed leather-like imitation leather or vinyl trim options as “vegan” leather to appeal to those who may feel that their car should do something a little bit more. for the environment or climate change, or maybe it’s just because the customer themselves might not like to eat meat, or in favor of raising animals for meat as ingredients.

However, according to electric car brand Polestar, leather is more sustainable than you might think.

Fredrika Klaren, Polestar’s head of sustainability, has a better background than most people to say this, as she’s spent time working in the European fashion industry, as well as for IKEA – so with hands-on experience with real materials from animals as well as artificial leather made from PVC.

Ms Klaren told Australian media that at this point, leather trim remains one of the more sustainable options for car interiors, because it means less reliance on what she calls “toxic” PVC-based composites.

“[The automotive industry is] keep the skin at a very high level,” she said. “And I think that’s because they know that if you just replace it with synthetics, you’re going to shift the negative impact to another area. And it could be even worse.

“It all depends on how you source the skins,” says Ms Klaren. “What we chose was to stick with leather because we found we couldn’t sustainably replace it. And we find that we can source skins from very conscious and responsible companies like Bridge of Weir, which we use in Polestar 2 and will use in Polestar 3.

“But of course we don’t want to contribute to the increase in meat production. That’s the important thing here. So we always choose to only buy hides when the value of the hides is less than 1% of the value of a whole cow,” she said.

“So if you sell your skin, it’s a meat by-product, so we want to make sure it’s a by-product. And I mean, it’s a by-product that we have to use. It’s unsustainable by just removing [the leather] – the meat industry will be here, but of course we want to make sure that, that we don’t create increased demand for this,” she said.

Ms Klaren says skin alternatives are improving and will continue to do so. For example, Polestar 3 will offer a newer alternative to leather called Inovyn, developed by British chemical manufacturing company, Ineos. It’s pine oil vinyl instead of PVC, as is often the case with faux leather trim.

“The big challenge with vegan leathers is that they depend on PVC. And PVC is the worst, the worst of the worst. It is very toxic.

“We also need to use PVC material, but we don’t want to. If we were only vegan, we would be very dependent on PVC. What we can do now is we can actually work on improving PVC. So we are now working with Inovyn at Polestar 3 to make sure that we at least get rid of PVC made from fossil fuels,” she said.

Ms. Klaren said there is still work to be done to reduce the environmental impact of materials in cars and that the brand will continue to strive to find “positive” materials for future models.

MORE ABOUT THAT: The truly climate-neutral car project of the progressive Polestar




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