Creating a leather-like premium material to replace traditional leather, and that too remotely - the story of Surat’s Leafy Leather

By Ketul

Updated 08 Sep, 2024

10 min read

India produces more than 500 million tonnes of agricultural residue every year, and nearly 20 million tonnes of it is burned in open fields, according to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. Stubble burning is one of the biggest seasonal contributors to air pollution across northern India, especially in states like Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh. At the same time, the country is also the second-largest producer of footwear and leather garments, exporting over $5 billion worth of leather annually, as per UNCTAD. The darker side of this industry is seldom discussed—3,000+ tanneries in India generate 20–30 million litres of toxic effluent every day, a portion of which still finds its way into rivers and soil, reported by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB).

Leafy Leather, founded by chemist Ashish Ramani, sits at the intersection of these two urgent challenges—crop-waste burning and leather pollution. His journey is a story of science, sustainability, and long-distance innovation that connects a small Indian farm to an R&D lab in the United States.

Early Influence: Growing Up Amid Fields and Smoke

Ashish grew up in a farming family, where annual cycles of cotton cultivation came with a harsh ritual—burning leftover stalks after harvest. As a child, he remembers the haze, the smell, the rising smoke. It wasn’t analysed as “air pollution” back then; it was just the way things were done. Yet something about it stayed with him. Years later, while working as a chemist in the United States, Ashish found himself surrounded by conversations on sustainability, climate responsibility, and consumer demand for eco-friendly materials—topics that had barely reached mainstream India at the time. “Sustainability was becoming a dinner-table conversation,” he says. Those conversations, combined with his childhood memories, became the foundation of Leafy Leather.

A Spark from Surat’s Fashion Industry

Around the same time, his wife began researching sustainability trends in India and realised how limited the adoption still was. During a conversation with her sister Manisha, a fashion designer in Surat—the textile capital of India—another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Manisha described how synthetic fibres like polyester and nylon were rapidly replacing natural cotton fabrics in the fashion industry. India produces nearly 1 million tonnes of synthetic fibres annually, and these plastics contribute heavily to textile waste, as reported by Textile Value Chain.

For the sisters, the rise of non-biodegradable fabrics was alarming. Fashion cycles are short, and fast fashion ends up in landfills quickly. “Real cotton is disappearing, and plastics are everywhere,” Manisha said in one of their early discussions. Together, they realised that if they wanted to solve something meaningful, they needed to create a high-value material—not just another niche eco-product.

Discovering the Scale of the Leather Problem

As Ashish dug deeper, the numbers were startling. India processes around 700,000 tonnes of animal hides annually, and leather tanning remains one of the country’s most polluting industries. The tannery hub in Kanpur alone has faced multiple shutdowns due to chromium contamination, groundwater toxicity, and unregulated effluent disposal. A 2019 CPCB survey highlighted that only 55% of tannery wastewater receives proper treatment, leaving the rest to pollute land and water.

The synthetic leather market wasn’t any cleaner. India produces over ₹31,000 crore worth of polyurethane (PU) and PVC-based leather each year, according to Invest India. These materials contain plasticizers, petroleum derivatives, and chemicals that never biodegrade.

This presented both a moral responsibility and a market opportunity—India was deeply dependent on leather, but the environmental cost was immense. “We wanted to reduce pollution at the source,” Ashish explains.

From Chemistry to Circular Design

With his chemistry background and Manisha’s fashion expertise, the idea evolved: create a plant-based leather alternative using agricultural residue that would normally be burned. Their first attempts revolved around cactus—an emerging biomaterial in other parts of the world—but sourcing cactus at scale in India was impractical.

So they turned to materials that were abundant, local, and cheap: banana stems and corn husk.

India is the world’s largest producer of bananas, generating millions of tonnes of stems and pseudostems that farmers typically discard. Meanwhile, sweet-corn vendors across cities produce mountains of husk waste daily. Research from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) indicates that both banana fibre and corn husk have strong lignocellulosic properties—ideal for creating flexible, durable biomaterials.

This shift proved pivotal. It aligned science with supply chain practicality.

Remote Innovation: Building a Material Across Two Continents

In mid-2024, Ashish discovered an Indian research institute already experimenting with bio-derived materials. The timing was perfect. Leafy Leather was registered in June, conversations began in July, and by October they had an MoU in place. What followed was a year of intense remote collaboration.

Ashish would join midnight calls from the US, while Manisha visited the institute’s labs in India. They exchanged videos, chemical compositions, process calculations, and hundreds of trial samples. “I have a full bag of early samples,” he laughs, recalling how crude and cardboard-like the initial prototypes were.

The real challenge came when scaling. There were no ready-made machines for a process like this—everything had to be customised. From temperature controls to pressure systems to sheet-forming equipment, each step needed redesigning. Failures were constant. But the team persisted.

By June 2025, after months of optimisation, they finally held a flexible, soft, leather-like sheet—one that could be bent, stretched, stitched, and finished just like traditional leather.

A Material That Feels Like Leather—Without the Harm

Leafy Leather’s final product is a 1×1 meter sheet, made from 95% bio-content, with less than 1% bio-derived additives, and zero animal-based ingredients. The topcoat is currently PU-based (like most plant-leather companies worldwide), but the team is already researching a bio-based coating to push biodegradability close to 100%.

Mechanical tests—tear strength, stretchability, hardness—show the material performs comparably to animal leather. Chemical tests confirm zero chromium and no toxic heavy metals.

Finished-goods manufacturers initially dismissed the early samples. But once the improved sheet arrived, the reaction changed dramatically. “Now they tell us they can’t tell the difference,” Ashish says.

Why Fashion is the First Frontier

The team chose fashion as their entry market for two reasons. First, the environmental need is highest: the fashion industry is responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions, per the UN Environment Programme. Second, fashion’s storytelling power is unmatched; it can catalyse cultural adoption faster than industrial categories like upholstery or automotive.

Leafy Leather’s first product line—wallets, handbags, laptop sleeves, and footwear—will go live within months. Early customers have already begun prototyping with the sheets.

Vision: A Global Indian Brand in Sustainable Materials

Over the next decade, Leafy Leather aims to:
• become 99–100% biodegradable,
• partner with India’s largest fashion houses,
• replace a meaningful share of both animal and synthetic leather,
• and build a global presence as an Indian innovation brand.

Ashish’s ambition is bold, but grounded in data: even if every plant-leather startup in India scaled to full capacity, they still wouldn’t replace 1% of the country’s leather production. The opportunity is enormous—and collective.

What Innovators Should Remember

Drawing from his own journey, Ashish offers three crisp lessons:
• Start with a real problem — not hype.
• Be patient — sustainability innovation takes time, failures, and iteration.
• Collaborate, don’t compete — the problem is too large for any one company to solve alone.

Closing Reflection

Leafy Leather is more than a biomaterial startup—it is a bridge between Indian farms and global fashion. It shows how circular innovation can emerge from ordinary crop residue, guided by science, persistence, and a vision for cleaner industries. As Ashish puts it, the goal is simple: replace harmful materials with better ones, at scale.

And through stories like this, India’s role in the global sustainable materials movement becomes clearer—rooted in nature, powered by ingenuity, and built for a future where progress no longer comes at the planet’s expense.

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) plays a crucial role in promoting sustainable development by systematically evaluating the environmental consequences of proposed projects before they are approved. Here’s how EIA contributes to sustainable development:

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Creating a leather-like premium material to replace traditional leather, and that too remotely - the story of Surat’s Leafy Leather

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