Fruit-waste leather: pineapple, apple and grape by-products move into fashion

Pineapple leaves, the pulp and skins left over from apple juice and wine, rejected mangoes and the water from mature coconuts are being turned into materials sold as alternatives to animal leather for shoes, bags and other accessories. A feature published by Jagonews24 on 27 June 2026 described this trend in sustainable fashion, named the companies behind the best-known materials and the brands that have used them, and argued that Bangladesh, with its large fruit harvest and its long-established leather and garment industries, could find a new opportunity in it. This report sets out what the feature said, checks its company and brand details against published records available by that date, and adds the background a reader needs: what these materials are made of, what independent laboratory tests found, and where Bangladesh's own fruit, leather and fibre sectors stood.

"Vegan leather" is a marketing term for any leather-like material made without animal skin. Conventional artificial leather, also sold as leatherette, faux leather or PU leather, is usually a textile, often polyester, coated with layers of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or polyurethane (PU), with a grain pattern embossed on the surface to imitate hide. A 2021 study by the FILK Freiberg Institute in Germany, published in the journal Coatings, noted that such materials are completely fossil-based and that the European standard EN 15987 restricts how the word "leather" may be used for them.

The same study described three ways in which makers were trying to bring plant material into leather alternatives. The first grows fibre networks directly, using bacteria that produce cellulose or the root-like mycelium of fungi. The second replaces part of the PVC or PU in a conventional coating with powdered agricultural waste used as a filler, such as apple pomace, grape residue or milled cactus leaves. The third keeps the coated-textile design but swaps the polyester base for a non-woven mat of natural fibre, as with pineapple leaf fibre. Most of the fruit-based materials named in the Jagonews24 feature fall into the second or third group, which matters for the claims made about them.

Pomace is the solid residue left after fruit has been pressed for juice, cider or wine. In grapes it is also called marc and consists of skins, seeds and stalks; in apples it is the pulp, peel and pips left after pressing. These residues are produced in large volumes at a single site, which is why juice factories and wineries became the first suppliers for these materials.

The pineapple (Ananas comosus) grows as a rosette of 30 or more long, tough, waxy leaves around a short stem. After harvest the leaves are left over, and in many countries they are left to rot or burned. Piñatex, the best-known material made from them, was developed by the Spanish designer Carmen Hijosa, who worked as a consultant to the leather goods industry in the Philippines in the 1990s and was inspired by the barong tagalog, a traditional Philippine garment woven from pineapple fibre. She developed the material through a doctorate at the Royal College of Art in London and founded Ananas Anam in 2013 to make and sell it.

According to published descriptions of the material, the long leaf fibres are felted into a non-woven sheet with polylactic acid (PLA), a plastic made from corn starch, giving a base of about 80 percent pineapple leaf fibre and 20 percent PLA, which is then coated with a resin. The company said about 480 leaves, the waste of 16 plants, are needed for one square metre, and that the fibre gave farmers an extra income. The FILK study of 2021 found that its Piñatex sample was a non-woven of cellulose fibres with a thin polymer coating similar to polyurethane acrylate, and that although the company promoted a PLA finish, the analysis showed "at least a remarkable content of PUR/acrylate" in it. Because of the PLA and resin, the material is not biodegradable.

The material reached well-known brands. In 2018 the German fashion house Hugo Boss released limited-edition men's sneakers with Piñatex uppers in blue, black, brown and yellow; the company said the leaves required no extra resources to grow and gave farming communities additional income. In spring 2019 H&M's Conscious Exclusive collection, launched on 11 April 2019, included a statement jacket of silver Piñatex mixed with jacquard, alongside a top made of Orange Fiber, a silk-like fabric from citrus juice by-products, and a pool slide of BLOOM foam made with algae.

The company itself was in serious financial trouble well before the Jagonews24 feature appeared. FashionUnited reported on 29 October 2025 that Ananas Anam UK Limited, the parent company, had entered administration on 19 August 2025, that its Spanish company had sought court protection in Barcelona in July 2025 with accumulated debt of 3.22 million euros, and that the administrators' report of 25 September 2025 said a rescue as a going concern was not considered viable and the company would be liquidated. Rescue talks with the fruit company Fresh Del Monte and with Compagnie Fruitière had not succeeded. The feature's description of Ananas Anam as an active producer therefore did not reflect the company's position in June 2026.

The feature credited the Italian company Frumat with first turning apple waste into a leather-like material. According to the British designer Stella McCartney's own account of the material, Frumat, based in Bolzano in northern Italy, recovers pulp, skins and seeds left over from apples grown for juice and jam, dehydrates them and grinds them into an apple powder, and Mabel Industries uses that powder to replace part of the oil-based raw material, combines it with polyurethane for durability and coats it onto canvas. Mabel and Frumat have worked on the material since 2014, and Mabel estimates that northern Italy alone produces about 30,000 tonnes of such apple waste. The material has been sold under names including AppleSkin and Uppeal.

The FILK laboratory found its AppleSkin sample to be a coated textile with thin compact polyurethane layers and a foamed polyurethane layer filled with organic particles, on a polyurethane-impregnated textile carrier: in its words, part of the polyurethane is replaced by agricultural by-products, but "the bulk of the materials remains to consist of polyurethane". The feature said Stella McCartney made both handbags and sneakers from apple leather. The brand's published record shows bags: Frayme tote, bucket and shoulder bags in an embossed Uppeal "Alter Croc" finish in its Winter 2023 runway collection, and Uppeal trims on the S-Wave baguette bag and a wallet clutch. No apple-based sneaker could be confirmed, so that claim is left out.

Vegea, the grape-based material, was founded in Milan in 2016 by the architect Gianpiero Tessitore and the chemist Francesco Merlino, and in 2017 it won first place in the H&M Foundation's Global Change Award, which came with a grant of 300,000 euros and a year in an accelerator programme. The company describes its material as derived from the fibres and oils in grape marc, and the environmental magazine Renewable Matter reported in 2018 that the world's roughly 26 billion litres of wine a year leave large amounts of marc, with Italy producing about 18 percent of the world's wine. The FILK laboratory found its Vegea sample to be a coated textile with polyurethane layers on a cellulose-based carrier.

The feature said H&M used Vegea's grape material in its Conscious Exclusive collection. The record shows otherwise: the 2019 Conscious Exclusive collection used Piñatex, Orange Fiber and BLOOM foam, while Vegea appeared in H&M's Co-Exist Story collection, made with the animal-rights group PETA and on sale from 4 November 2021, where it was used for an embossed vest and trousers. This report gives the corrected collection.

Fruitleather Rotterdam was started by Hugo de Boon and Koen Meerkerk, who began the work in 2015 as students at an art academy: a school assignment to make pigment from fruit waste from a Rotterdam market left them with dried pulp that had leather-like properties. The United Nations Regional Information Centre reported in November 2021 that the company was collecting about 1,000 kilograms of mangoes a week, that the Netherlands was the world's second-largest mango importer with Rotterdam as a transit port, and that the founders said their product caused less pollution and fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional leather. The Jagonews24 feature described the method as blending the peel and pulp of rejected mangoes into a paste, drying it into sheets and finishing it with a waterproof coating.

Ohoskin, the citrus material named in the feature, describes itself as the first patented material made from orange and cactus by-products, produced entirely in Italy with oranges from Sicily, and says the material combines bio-based polymers with recycled polymers. The feature's statement that it was being used for well-known car interiors and watch straps could not be confirmed and is left out.

Malai, the coconut-based material, is made by Malai Biomaterials, which the company says was founded in 2018 in Kerala, India, by the Slovak material designer Zuzana Gombosova and the Indian product designer and engineer Susmith Suseelan, with most of its work in Kochi. Its base material is bacterial cellulose fermented from the water of mature coconuts collected from coconut processing units. Bacterial cellulose is a form of cellulose produced by bacteria growing on a sugar-rich liquid; researchers describe it as purer than plant cellulose and as a promising leather alternative because of its material properties, low infrastructure needs and biodegradability. Malai says it works only with bio-based materials that are locally sourced, biodegradable and non-toxic; this is the company's own claim.

The feature also named Bananatex as a leather made from discarded banana stems in Switzerland and India. That needs correcting. Bananatex is a canvas fabric, not a leather, developed over three years by QWSTION, a bag company in Zurich, with a yarn spinning company in Tainan, Taiwan. It is made from the fibre of abacá (Musa textilis), a banana species native to the Philippines that is grown for its fibre, not for fruit, and the plants are cultivated in Catanduanes province in the Philippines. Abacá fibre, also known as Manila hemp, is extracted from the leaf sheaths that make up the plant's false trunk and is used for ropes, tea bags and banknote paper. Bananatex is sold with or without a beeswax waterproof coating.

Two further materials in the feature are not made from fruit. Desserto is made from nopal, the prickly pear cactus, by the Mexican entrepreneurs Adrián López Velarde and Marte Cázarez. In April 2021 Karl Lagerfeld released a collection with the model Amber Valletta that reinterpreted its K/Kushion bag in Desserto cactus leather, and in the same month Fossil launched the Kier tote bags made with Desserto; the feature said Fossil used cactus leather for watch straps, but the solar watch launched alongside the totes had a strap of recycled PET plastic, so the strap claim is corrected. The FILK study found its Desserto sample to be a polyurethane-coated polyester textile filled with organic particles.

The Hermès item named in the feature was a version of its Victoria travel bag in Sylvania, a material grown from fungal mycelium by the US company MycoWorks and tanned by Hermès tanners in France, as Fortune reported in November 2022. By the time of the feature, MycoWorks had changed course: on 23 October 2025 the trade publication Just Style reported that the company would close its factory in South Carolina, which had opened in 2023, stop growing mycelium itself and move to sourcing and tanning it, citing problems of scale and cost.

The FILK Freiberg Institute tested a shoe-upper leather, a conventional polyurethane-coated artificial leather and nine alternative materials, among them Desserto, Piñatex, AppleSkin and Vegea, using microscopy, infrared spectroscopy and standard physical tests for tear strength, flexing, water vapour permeability and water absorption. Its central finding was that none of the alternatives matched the all-round performance of leather, although some reached high values in individual properties. The authors suggested that leather's naturally grown, layered structure, with a very tight surface and a density gradient through its thickness, had not yet been reproduced with either synthetic or bio-based materials.

The study found that most of the alternatives were very tight against water vapour, which would make shoes uncomfortable because feet would sweat, although it would keep bags and rain jackets waterproof. It concluded that when agricultural by-products are added to the polymer layers of artificial leather, the bio-based content rises but no physical advantage over the reference material can be measured, and that only a proper life cycle analysis would show the environmental benefit. Screening for hazardous substances also found traces of restricted compounds in several samples, including butanone oxime in AppleSkin. These findings qualify the feature's statements that fruit leather needs no toxic chemicals and is free of plastic: that holds for some materials, such as bacterial cellulose sheets, but the most widely sold fruit-based materials tested in 2021 relied on polyurethane or other polymer coatings.

The feature's case for Bangladesh rested partly on the pollution caused by tanning animal hides with chromium salts, a method developed in the nineteenth century as an alternative to tanning with plant tannins. Bangladesh's tanneries were concentrated for decades in Hazaribagh in Dhaka. Human Rights Watch reported in October 2012 that the area held 90 to 95 percent of the country's tanneries, about 150 of them by its estimate; that, according to figures stated by the government and the tannery associations in 2003, they discharged about 21,600 cubic metres of hazardous liquid waste a day; and that a Department of Environment sampling had measured chromium of 3,324 and 2,558 milligrams per litre in wastewater against a standard of 2 milligrams per litre.

The tanneries were later moved to the Savar Tannery Industrial Estate at Hemayetpur in Savar, but the problems did not end there. Prothom Alo reported in January 2018 that untreated liquid and solid waste carrying high levels of chromium and salt from the relocated factories was degrading the water of the Dhaleshwari river. The Daily Star reported in July 2022 that 134 tanneries were operating at the estate, which had cost Tk 1,015 crore and taken 18 years to build; that its central effluent treatment plant, built at a cost of Tk 521 crore, could treat 25,000 cubic metres of waste a day while demand rose to 42,000 to 45,000 cubic metres during Eid-ul-Azha; that the chromium recovery unit could handle 1,050 cubic metres a day but received about 5,000; and that Bangladeshi exporters received 30 to 40 percent lower prices than competitors, while the country's tanneries lacked certification from the Leather Working Group, an international certification body for leather makers.

The sector remains a major export earner. Citing Export Promotion Bureau data, The Daily Star reported in September 2025 that exports of leather, leather products and footwear were about 1,145 million dollars in the 2023-24 financial year and about 1,039 million dollars in 2024-25, and that government and sector reviews put employment in leather and footwear at 8 to 10 lakh people. It also reported that when the Savar treatment plant underperformed, tanneries could not pass buyers' environmental checks, which limited their access to higher-value orders.

The feature said Bangladesh is among the large producers of mango, jackfruit and pineapple. According to Banglapedia, the pineapple came to Bangladesh through Assam and Manipur in India and was first cultivated in Sylhet early in the twentieth century; it is grown in most districts, with the largest areas in Sylhet, Tangail, Dhaka and Rangamati, and the main varieties are Giant Kew (locally called Calendar), Honey Queen (Jaldubi) and Red Spanish (Ghorashal). The Dhaka Tribune reported in October 2024, citing local agriculture officers, that pineapple covered 7,600 hectares in Tangail district, 6,630 of them in Madhupur upazila, producing about 275,000 tonnes a year, and that Madhupur's pineapple had received geographical indication status on 24 September 2024. The same report traced the area's cultivation to 1942, when Mizi Sangma, a Garo woman from Idilpur village, brought 750 Calendar saplings from Meghalaya.

Mango is grown on a much larger scale. The Daily Star reported in September 2025, citing the Department of Agricultural Extension, that Bangladesh produced 24 to 25 lakh tonnes of mangoes a year, grown commercially in 23 districts with 72 varieties, while exports in the 2025 season were 2,194 tonnes. Jackfruit is the national fruit; Banglapedia notes that its rind and leaves are already fed to livestock, so not all fruit waste is unused, and any plan to turn residues into materials would have to compete with such existing uses.

Bangladesh already had a small pineapple-leaf industry by the time of the feature. The Dhaka Tribune reported in October 2024 that in Madhupur, where the leaves were traditionally left to rot in the fields or used as animal feed, the Mennonite Central Committee Bangladesh had started a thread-production project at Jolsotro market, and BURO Bangladesh had set up a handicraft factory in Jangalia village in 2017. Machines extract the fibre, which workers scrub, wash and dry in the sun; leaves unsuitable for thread are made into boxes, mats, wall hangings, keyrings and tissue paper.

According to that report, about 100 to 150 kilograms of fibre can be produced from every 1,000 kilograms of leaves. A farmer quoted in it said each fully grown plant has about 36 leaves, of which 15 to 20 are cut after harvest and are now sold for extra income. An official of BURO Bangladesh said 70 people were employed at the factory, most of them women from marginalised backgrounds according to the report, and that about 400 workers had been trained, while production had slowed for a time because of high stocks.

Bangladeshi researchers have also tested how the fibre can be spun. A study published in the journal Heliyon in August 2021 by researchers from the textile engineering department of Khulna University of Engineering & Technology, the Bangladesh Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and other institutions spun 100 percent pineapple leaf fibre yarn of 121 and 138 tex on existing ring and jute spinning frames, and blended yarn with 10 and 20 percent pineapple fibre on a cotton spinning system, then wove plain and twill fabrics from them.

The writer of the Jagonews24 feature set out four ways in which Bangladesh could benefit, presented here as the writer's argument:

• A new export sector: turning fruit peel and waste into leather alternatives, through local technology or joint ventures, could create a "Made in Bangladesh" product for international markets.
• Less pollution: the writer contrasted chromium and chemical discharge from hide tanning with fruit-based materials; as the FILK tests show, the gain depends on how much synthetic coating a given material carries.
• Extra income for farmers: pineapple leaves and banana plants left after harvest could be sold as raw material, as Madhupur's leaf trade had already begun to show.
• Inputs for the garment industry: labels, jackets and accessories made from such materials could, in the writer's view, raise the value of Bangladeshi clothing with international buyers who seek sustainable products.

The writer concluded that if Bangladesh invested in these technologies and opened the way for young entrepreneurs, it could compete in the global market for sustainable fashion. The record of the companies the feature named points to the conditions such a venture would face: Ananas Anam's insolvency in 2025 and MycoWorks' factory closure the same year showed that turning farm residues into a leather substitute at industrial scale and competitive cost had proved difficult even for the best-known pioneers.

Photo: Piñatex / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jagonews24, FILK Freiberg Institute (Coatings, 2021), FashionUnited, VegNews, H&M Group, Stella McCartney, Renewable Matter, PETA, United Nations Regional Information Centre (UNRIC), Malai Biomaterials, Ohoskin, Bananatex, Green Queen, Fortune, Just Style, Human Rights Watch, The Daily Star, Prothom Alo, Dhaka Tribune, Banglapedia, Heliyon, Wikipedia