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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I didn't see the announcement, but I saw this blurb on Engadget:

> The company noted that while leather is popular for things like watch straps, it has a serious impact on the environment, particularly at Apple's scale.

Is that actually true? I remember reading a few years ago that there was actually a big glut of leather: people still eat steak and hamburgers, and without a market for the cow hides then that material is wasted. That is, I thought the leather market was largely a byproduct of the beef market, and that reducing leather usage won't have a measurable impact on reducing the number of slaughtered cows.

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you're right, this is greenwashing. I sell into the market sometimes and the hides are basically wasted unless you try hard to line up buyers. plus, if your beef is grass fed for its whole life like ours, it's carbon neutral, as all the carbon that goes into the animal came from the atmosphere. It's true that factory-raised beef is bad for the environment though, as they eat grains that are fertilized from oil via Haber–Bosch. It's also true that tanning uses lots of nasty stuff, but there is vegetable tanning which works well and sourced from nuts and stuff.

> you're right, this is greenwashing ... plus, if your beef is grass fed for its whole life like ours, it's carbon neutral, as all the carbon that goes into the animal came from the atmosphere

Sounds like you might be doing a bit of greenwashing yourself. The carbon came from the atmosphere, but the cows make methane, which is much worse. Also they spoil the land and water. And also you're not counting the carbon used to actually raise them, like the gas in the equipment and the transport.

Now calculate the use of the agricultural machinery to get the same number of calories from plants. I have no idea how cows "spoil land and water". Have you seen a cow?

No one ever said plant based food is carbon neutral. But it uses way less carbon than cows. And yes, I've seen a cow. Many. They spoil the land by trampling it and the water by having their excrement run off into it.

Oh man… wait ‘til you find out where fish excrement goes. No such thing as unspoiled water by that definition.

A single cow eats many times the calories it is worth before it is ready to be eaten.

The land with cattle on are the most productive, as they get quite a compliment of natural fertilizer from the cattle. I would say cattle do not spoil the land, but improve it. This can't help but be the case, given the way grass responds to being eaten.

Additionally, once the grazers improve grass life, the water-table improves. The worst lakes in our area are surrounded by fertilized annual crops. Their water is polluted with nitrogen fertilizers and are very poor quality, with blue-green algae blooms, and as a result are not swimmable. My friend lost a dog to such a lake.

The land with active grazers in contrast, is very good at preventing this problem. The best lake for 200km around me is surrounded by grass-fed cattle operations, and there is absolutely no problem with algae blooms.

I think a central problem of our time is that educated elites are detached from reality, not seeing things like what I mention above, and so are acting upon their false perceptions, causing great harms as a result. The Apple announcement today about leather acts to confirm my suspicions about this.

You miss methane

Thats not how that works, just like the water cycle there is a carbon cycle.

You can’t produce “more” greenhouse gases in a closed system, the system will ebb and flow; until you dig up megatons of carbon that has been stored for a few hundred millennia and insert it into that system.

(same story with polar ice caps and the water cycle)

The water cycle is actually the perfect analogy. The form of the water is almost as important as the amount. When you take all the water out of the ground and put it on the surface, and then a bunch evaporates, sure, we have the same amount of water. But we're still in big trouble because we don't have usable fresh water.

If you take a bunch of carbon in the grass and convert it to methane gas, sure you have the same amount, but it's a lot worse for the planet.

My current (and if I understood correctly: the current scientific) understanding of the carbon cycle does not indicate that methane is significantly more harmful than other forms of carbon release, mostly due to the fact that it does not have a significant lifetime in the atmosphere.

The issue remains, squarely, on adding to the carbon cycle. The harmful values of methane output is directly correlated with the oil based feed which GP mentions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7725657/

https://meteor.geol.iastate.edu/gccourse/alumni/chem/carbon/...

Yea the methane thing has always seemed dubious, I looked into it more seriously years ago and came away with the same impression.

The water cycle is a great example because it is filtering the water as it goes, rapidly producing fresh water that rains on the land. Methane, likewise, is a short-lived byproduct of excess animal activity, and in a steady state sustainable mode, we have equality. The problem is the finger of oil on the scale, not the grass-raised beef, just like how excess bovines produce excess methane.

Don't forget about the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer that is sprayed over crops that gets washed into the water. The Mississippi river and the Gulf of Mexico dead zone is an example. Where i live, cow pasture land mostly is untouched.

Also, cows have feet and digestive systems so it takes more equipment and diesel for harvesting and processing grains.

I never said commercial farming was any better. I was just saying calling the cows carbon-neutral was equally greenwashing.

They don't kill cows to make leather. The cows are raised for meat and milk. Actually, NOT using leather is worse for the environment because now you have leather which has no use and you're creating pleather or whatever replacement.

I know this? I think you replied to the wrong comment.

> plus, if your beef is grass fed for its whole life like ours, it's carbon neutral, as all the carbon that goes into the animal came from the atmosphere

This totally ignores the land use issue. Cattle absolutely decimate natural areas. e.g. significant areas of the midwest/great plain that were prairie with deep roots to store carbon are now pasture. Pasture grass has comparatively shallow roots and limited ability to store carbon.

Hasn't the midwest host large herds of grazing buffalo for millenia? I think the last I read about this stuff, most cattle farmers want their grass to still be the old school deep-rooted stuff, if other grasses take over it is a symptom of overgrazing.

> Hasn't the midwest host large herds of grazing buffalo for millenia?

Only because humans killed all the megafauna at the end of the last ice age.

The question now is if populating it with millions of cows for us to eat is the right thing to do.

I think this is generally false. Cloven hooved animals regenerate prairie and topsoil if grazed responsibly.

Two things:

- Grazers improve the capacity of grass to carbon capture

- Some land is ONLY able to grow grass. The alternative is desertification, and so livestock is the only option to produce food. edit: unless you bring in fossil fertilizers.

no, cattle grazing on land serves to regenerate the land.

I thought the issue was that cows produce a lot of methane which is 20x worse foe trapping heat than CO2?

I think what you are doing is definitely better than some of the specific agriculture feedstocks for cows that increase the enteric emissions of cows to make them grow quickly. That said it isn't carbon neutral - the digestive systems of cows produce methane from food. Methane is between 24- 29 times more impactful then carbon for global warming.

Cows still have a signifiant impact on especially as a function of how large the industry has become.

And to your point - wasting hides is also not great. Would be great if we were less wasteful in general.

I suspect that because of conservation of energy, methane is a highly reactive over the short term, but ultimately an insignificant element in the big picture IF you ignore the massive oil inputs humans are adding to the system. That is to say, methane on its own is not a reason to discourage digging up oil to make grain, which is used to feed cattle.

One of the issues is that the tanning process requires the use of toxic chemicals, that are afterward often released to the environment.

Well - they could just tan the leather the old fashioned way and use the cow brains.

https://www.leather-dictionary.com/index.php/Brain_tanning

I'd love to see Apple's slick marketing video about how your new Apple Watch strap was tanned with cow brains.

"we asked ourselves what would a cow think about this?

so to do that we really wanted to get inside a cows brain.

we figure dok now that we're here, let's explode it out onto the platter of dead skin of that same animal to capture it's essence.

so without further adieu

I present to you

iBrainSplatStainedWatchStrap"

Prionic Shield™

Yeah, but then what would they make dog food and jello out of?

USA & europe tanneries are usually pretty regulated and treat their wastewater. Other countries may vary.

It's hard to know for sure. The most common analysis, following the PEFCR standard, takes the carbon impact of cows and then divides it up in a certain ratio between flesh and leather products, then adds the tanning and production steps. Arguably it would be fairer to treat leather as purely a byproduct, which would dramatically reduce the resulting carbon footprint numbers for leather.

Would the price of meat go up without the sale of leather? If so, I think it's more fair to call it a coproduct rather than a byproduct.

I'd go as far as saying that leather accessories are actually even better for environment since they easily outlast any fabric or silicone ones. It's really just shameless greenwashing from Apple, nothing more.

> I'd go as far as saying

Citing is much preferred to saying.

> since they easily outlast any fabric or silicone ones

perhaps not as true when they are phone accessories. ;-)

Leather itself is a driver of deforestation and not just a secondary byproduct.

Why alternatives to leather matter:

Nowhere to hide: how the fashion industry is linked to amazon rainforest destruction [0]

[0] https://www.stand.earth/publication/forest-conservation/amaz...

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29433500

FYI your link is bad, should be https://stand.earth/resources/nowhere-to-hide-how-the-fashio... .

I read that article, but I disagree that the conclusion is "Leather itself is a driver of deforestation and not just a secondary byproduct."

That is, what I'd like to know is whether all those cows in Brazil would still exist even without a leather marker, but just for their beef. The linked research sort of tries to make that argument, but it doesn't really provide any convincing evidence.

Replace killing cows with micro plastic pollution, slap Apple price on it and call it an eco improvement.

In few years full reverse, cleaning up the planet while supporting free range happy lives of cows. Really, who actually buys this in-your-face bullshit? There are proper technical improvements to talk about.

I learned recently that microplastics are primarily from fabrics. Our polyester/synthetic workout clothes shed them in the washer and they end up everywhere. Plastics also generally have a pretty low carbon footprint, ironically.

Apple’s new “FineWoven” products seem to be fabric-like.

Sure, but I doubt many people will be throwing them in the washing machine.

Also tires

https://microplastics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s435...

There are interesting second-order effects. For example, this will tend to make wholesale leather less expensive, for producers of third-party bands and other small items (I assume that large items use a different type of leather, since they require larger swathes).

I'm surprised they're pricing these new fabric bands at $99. If they sold these alongside leather bands, would they sell at that price? Seems like they're trying to position them as a replacement for a premium product, but without any proof that they are worthy of the lofty price.

The braided solo loops have the same price ($99), it was not exclusively for leather bands.

Yikes! I guess that's why I buy more AAPL stock than Apple Watches.

I read that somewhere as well, but I can’t find any reputable sources.

Here is a detailed Fortune article from 2019: https://archive.vn/bBzYV

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