Did you know that many leather jackets are made in countries like India and China - where there are NO animal protection laws? Cows are abused and tortured - sometimes spicy chili pepper is smushed into their eyes to make them keep moving when they stop from exhaustion. Calf‘s skin, which society creepily values for it’s softness (just like babies’ heads?), is made from baby cows who are sometimes taken from the veal industry (where they spend their short lives in a cage so small that they can't even turn around) or sometimes prematurely taken from their mother's wombs... which is sad and gross. 

But if none of that bothers you, there’s environmental impact too. Although many American and European companies use less toxic processes to tan and dye leather, factories in 3rd world countries like China and India still continue to use chemicals that release cancer causing runoff into the water, harming the local communities that depend on that water for their way of life and harming factory workers who handle the toxins on the daily. Even though leather is natural and biodegradable, the processes to make it are not. It also survives for thousands of years, which is one long ass half-life if it ends up in a landfill. (The US honestly can't afford to create more waste since China is no longer accepting our trash or recyclables. Pretty crazy that we would just ship garbage to China in the first place as if that was a sustainable idea in the first place - great long term thinking, team! That's why a closed-loop system is where it's @ bb.)