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Now this is interesting. With cattle and meat animals being quite expensive compared to leafy plants (albeit tastier), I wonder if such plant fibres will end up being a widespread product...
Do you think this will escape the realms of fashion and trendy ideas?

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3059190/this-gorgeous-sustainable-leather-is-made-from-pineapple-waste

When leather expert Carmen Hijosa visited the Philippines to consult with the leather industry there, she discovered two big problems: The leather was poor quality, and producing it was bad both for the local environment and the people involved.
But as she traveled around the country, she had an epiphany. The Philippines grows a lot of pineapples—and ends up with a lot of wasted pineapple leaves. The leaves, she realized, had certain features that might make it possible to turn them into a plant-based leather alternative.

"It's very fine," Hijosa says. "It has very good strength and flexibility, which is really what we need to make a non-woven substrate." She also looked at other local plants, such as banana fibers and sisal. But only pineapple fibers were strong and flexible enough to handle the manufacturing process she had in mind.

Making animal-based leather typically involves hazardous chemicals such as formaldehyde and heavy metals such as chrome, all of which can cause problems when they end up in wastewater. Like meat, since leather comes from animals that require massive amounts of feed, it also has a large carbon footprint. Fake leather is usually made from petroleum, and has processing problems of its own.
Because pineapple leaves would normally be wasted, turning them into leather is an extra source of income for farmers. After farmers take the first step in processing the leaves, separating the long fibers, they also end up with biomass that can be used as fertilizer back in the pineapple fields.

Seems like a good idea.
Uses something that would be wasted and gives farmers something else to boot!

I'm sure real leather enthusiasts will tell the difference. Me. I just want a belt that holds my jeans.

That's cool. I'm not sure how long it takes for the plant to produce leaves of sufficient size to be useful for textiles, I know it takes 2 years to grow the pineapple fruit though.

There's a frustrating/depressing multitude of things we could be doing that we don't do for various reasons. Here in the US it's illegal to grow hemp, an incredibly useful plant, because the government doesn't want anyone mistakenly believing it to be marijuana. Lunacy.

I wonder sometimes, how much we do because "it's always been done that way."
But then again, new for the sake of new...
It's hard to tell what's actual progress, and what is folk just being creative.

 Buttery Commissar wrote:
I wonder sometimes, how much we do because "it's always been done that way."
But then again, new for the sake of new...
It's hard to tell what's actual progress, and what is folk just being creative.

True. As time passes the way we do things becomes established and people/entities gain a vested interest in maintaining the status quo because they derive financial profit and/or political power and/or social influence from it. Once the constituency exists pressure is exerted to avoid change. Nobody really advocates for progress, it just happens. People weren't clamoring for the invention of the internet before it happened, it just happened and everyone had to cope with the financial and social upheaval/progress it brought with it. It's hard to get people to advocate for a future that hasn't happened yet that they aren't benefitting from and is inherently uncertain, while it's easy for people to want things to stay the same, it's what they know, it's how things work and at least some portion of the people derive a benefit from it.

The leather industry already exists, the pineapple textile industry doesn't. One has global reach and financial resources, the other is a hypothetical. That's nowhere close to being a fair fight.

 Buttery Commissar wrote:
I wonder sometimes, how much we do because "it's always been done that way."
But then again, new for the sake of new...
It's hard to tell what's actual progress, and what is folk just being creative.

I hear you.
And yet I'm very much a 'use the whole buffalo' kind of person- I hate waste and inefficiency.
If it is sensible to use the leaves and proves economically viable (ie- can stand on its own without being propped up with tax payer's subisdies) then this might be a winner.

 =Angel= wrote:

 Buttery Commissar wrote:
I wonder sometimes, how much we do because "it's always been done that way."
But then again, new for the sake of new...
It's hard to tell what's actual progress, and what is folk just being creative.

I hear you.
And yet I'm very much a 'use the whole buffalo' kind of person- I hate waste and inefficiency.
If it is sensible to use the leaves and proves economically viable (ie- can stand on its own without being propped up with tax payer's subisdies) then this might be a winner.

I'd be ok with giving new business tax breaks for a defined amount of money and duration in order to give them a better chance of building something that can compete with established business. That's one of the factors that stifles innovation, established business have the power to influence laws and regulations to make it harder for anyone to compete against them. More competition is better for everyone and it's good restraint on corporations becoming too big to fail or monopolistic.

Of course then you get the problem of the government picking winners and losers and potentially losing money on start ups/companies that don't succeed. Personally I think it's better to tackle that problem than it is to let the big companies squash competition and prevent innovation.