It all started with a trip to the Philippines. Carmen Hijosa, a Spanish fashion designer who worked in the leather industry was captivated when she bought a shirt that was woven together by fibers of pineapple leaves. After that experience, she decided that pineapple leaves would be a great substitute to make artificial leather because of its strong and fibrous structure. And after 5 years of research, she finally came up with a sustainable product: Piñatex.
Traditional leather is very laborious to produce plus it is unsustainable. In order to make leather, the cows consume a lot of water and food and they take up a lot of land. As a result, cows take in a lot of resources and leave behind a large carbon footprint. In addition, there are many chemicals that are involved that are used for processing the leather, such a formaldehyde. These chemicals are very harmful to the environment and can contaminate nearby water sources. In regards to fake leather, or pleather as some like to call it, there are still environmental risks when synthesizing it because it is made from petroleum.
Piñatex is made from the fibers of pineapple leaves.
This product is completely sustainable because all the materials come from the
by-product of the pineapple harvest that would have been left to rot or be
burned. On average, the agriculture industry produces 40 tons of waste from
pineapple leaves each year. Piñatex is so environmentally friendly that even
the waste from making the Piñatex can be used as a fertilizer for future
pineapple crops. It only takes about 480 pineapple leaves to make one square
meter of Piñatex, which makes this product lightweight and cost efficient. After
Piñatex is synthesized, the leather can be stitched into goods such as handbags
or shoes or even furniture.
Hijosa was already a part of the fashion industry when
she came up with this product. She actually had been a specialist in leather
production for 15 years and was sent on a trip to the Philippines to actually
oversee the leather production at one of her company’s plants. However, when
she got there, she realized that leather was not a sustainable product. She
recalls in an interview that she was struck with that realization and thought,
"I need to do something about this. I'm a maker. I know leather - but we need
an alternative". She decided to get
her PhD at the Royal College of Art in order to gain more knowledge on how to
synthesize textiles before she created her own company Ananas Anam that creates
Piñatex. Piñatex is now being used in prototypes for major brands, such as
Puma.
Hijosa is a Pro-C creative because she did have experience in the leather industry before coming up with Piñatex. In addition, her creative process is collaborative. In an interview, she states: “There are brilliant minds [at the Royal College of the Arts] and it is the perfect place to collaborate with people in different departments. I want this material to be a break-through ethically responsible product, and I know that the RCA is the place to develop this process and to create something new and exciting.” This relates to the Small Worlds article and how collaboration can help the creative process. By associating with different artists and designers, Hijosa is able “to gain the kind of credibility that unfamiliar material needs to be regarded as valuable in new contexts”. She was able to take her past knowledge and the knowledge from her peers to turn something so ordinary into something extraordinary.
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I really enjoy her distinctive method of attacking an issue of sustainability. The fact that pineapples are capable of producing such a product is amazing by itself, but coupled with your description of sustainability I truly believe it’s one of a kind. I also find it very interesting that Hijosa understood the issues with leather from firsthand experience. Her knowledge and experience definitely played a role in both her identification of the problem and development of the solution. I am curious though, who and how did she collaborate to help further the development of her product?
ReplyDeleteThe first thing I that caught my attention when reading the article was the location: the Philippines. As a Filipino-American it was interesting to learn how big the leather industry is in the country. It's incredible that a fruit like pineapple (which happens to be one of my favorites) can be used as a substitute for leather. Hijosa was keen in her observation of the shirt woven by pineapple leaves and creative in using that knowledge into forming a leather alternative. I'm interested to see what kind of products the pineapple leaves will be used for and how much it will cost should brands choose to use it.
ReplyDeleteInitially I was very surprised with the actual environmental damage that leather production creates. I never made the connection between leather and the huge carbon footprint. It is also interesting how she worked in the leather industry before she began her creative process. I would assume that somebody who is an insider would do their best to NOT create an alternative and just keep doing what they are doing in order to maintain job security. I wonder how feasible this process will be on a large scale, since leather production is a huge market that has very high demands and sales. If production is not efficient, it will not be able to spread to a larger scale and that would create problems in advancement.
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