What is Piñatex Leather?
What’s even more amazing today is that pineapple leaves are being used to make leather seats! That could be prickly.
Piñatex was developed by Dr Carmen Hijosa and first presented at the PhD graduate exhibition at the Royal College of Art, London. Piñatex is manufactured and distributed by Dr Hijosa’s company Ananas Anam Ltd.
Piñatex’s development began when Dr Hijosa was working as consultant in the leather goods industry in the Philippines in the 1990s. She observed the leather produced there by was poor quality, environmentally unsustainable and bad for the people involved in the industry.
Piñatex is created by felting the long fibre strands of the pineapple leaves together to create a non-woven substrate.
16 pineapples are used which give an average of 480 leaves to create around 1 square meter of material. One average around 40,000 tonnes of waste pineapples leaves are produced each year.
It has been said its got a much softer more pliable finish than other synthetic leathers.
The only issues with this product at present is its not biodegradable so causes a problem for the environment. It’s a mixture of polylactic acids and petroleum based resins.
I wonder what could be achieved if other plant life was looked at for production?
There are many types of fake leathers around today that are just problematic.
Piñatex synthetic leather hides.
To name a few of them.