Chemist fears confusion over imitators may hurt category
Joan Gunin -- Furniture Today, July 2, 2007
Cincinnati — As a leather chemist, Nicholas Cory does not want leather's reputation to be tarnished by alternative products such as bonded leather.
"To call it 'leather' is outright deception, outright fraud," said Cory, director of the Leather Research Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati, of bonded leather. "It's not leather.... It's a synthetic that has leather fibers glued to the underside."
Cory is crusading to educate people about this new leather imitator. Not only is the terminology confusing to consumers, but he fears a bad experience with bonded products could harm genuine leather's image and make consumers shy away from the real deal in the future.
"When it gets fabricated into a chair or a sofa, the consumer never gets to touch or see the real leather content," he said.
Further complicating the issue is the fact that another type of bonded leather already exists, while the new upstart is also being referred to as bonded leather.
The original bonded leather has been around for many years, Cory said, noting it is prevalent in such items as children's toy holsters but is not strong enough for seating surfaces.
This true bonded leather, Cory said, is a sheet of ground-up leather fibers embedded in a latex matrix, bound together with a fixative.
The new bonded product being used for upholstery features several layers of laminated material. These layers include a polyurethane finish; a thick layer of non-woven polyurethane-type material; a woven synthetic textile; and a thin layer of leather fibers that have not been bound to each other but glued to the underside of the laminate, he said.
The old bonded leather contains 50% to 90% leather fiber and the new product has less than 20%, but the two are identified by the manufacturing process, not leather content, he said.
Citing the Dictionary of Leather Terminology, Cory said, once leather has been pulverized, it is no longer leather: "If tanned hide or skin has been disintegrated mechanically and/or chemically into fibrous particles, small pieces or powders, and then with or without a bonding agent is made into sheets or forms, such sheets or forms are not leather."
It's difficult to get terminology changed, he said. "(Bonded leather) is with us; it's here. But these companies are actually manufacturing synthetic laminated products."
Bycast is still leather because it refers to the process of coating a leather hide with polyurethane, not grinding it. The two-ply product also can be called "polyurethane leather laminate" or "leather polyurethane laminate," depending on which material is thicker.
