Science Turning peanuts into leather bags

Peanut Leather is about 1 millimeter thick and does not use any dye, with its brown color coming from the peanut skins themselves. It is made water-resistant with PVC. Fifteen kilograms of peanut skins can make a leather sheet 90 centimeters wide and 100 meters long, according to Kashiwa Leather. [...] Making leather from animal hides normally involves tanning, cutting and sewing. For Peanut Leather, the skins are turned into fine powder, processed into long, thin sheets, and then finished to look like animal leather. Because peanut-skin leather is unprecedented, it took Kashiwa Leather about a year of trial and error to develop it. The company failed to make leather out of peanut shells, and about a dozen contractors approached could not provide suitable skin-crushing services. Peanut Leather is a promising innovation because the quality can be made uniform, much like synthetic textiles. With animal leather, parts are discarded over size or quality considerations. There are cases where the animal's small size limits what products can be made.

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