Recently I read an article called "Looking to Reduce Waste? Choose Real Leather." In 2020, 33 million cattle were processed for food in the US. Only 28.2 million hides were used to create leather. This left 4.8 million hides to be wasted. The wasted hides could have been turned into 96 million footballs, 86.4 million pairs of shoes, 1.6 million sofas but instead turned into 120 tons of unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions. The summary of this article was: do not feel bad or guilty about using REAL leather hides because these are a natural byproduct of the meat industry as humans continue to consume meat and dairy. Turning a hide into leather is one of the oldest forms of recycling. Source: usleather.org.