Episode 16 - Reeling in Sustainability: Fish Skin Leather

Sustainable leather made from sea and tree is our podcast topic today. We're going to meet Tasha Nathanson, the curious entrepreneur who runs a leather innovation company called Seven Leagues Leather. Tasha and her team run a circular economy tannery that upcycles fishery and forestry waste and crafts it into beautiful, durable biomaterial through their proprietary eco-friendly process. Fish leather is an eco-luxury good, 9 times stronger per thickness than any other leather with a gorgeous scaled pocket pattern, and is proudly created in a way that enhances the wellbeing of individuals, communities, and the environment. Are you curious? I know I sure am. Stay tuned and dive in with me. Hello listeners and welcome to the Ecoish Podcast. I'm Tracy Lydiatt, founder of Sustainable Living School and your host today. The purpose of the Eco-ish Podcast is to illuminate the good work towards sustainability that companies are doing, honestly discuss trade-offs they might wrestle with, and to create space to share their interesting stories to help listeners like you make informed choices. Eco-ish Podcast honors the imperfect journey towards creating an eco-conscious brand in an unsustainable world. Hi, Tasha. It's so great to have you here today. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. How are you? And can you tell us where you're calling in from? Hello.

I am very well, thank you. And I am calling in from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Ah, one of my heart homes. Thank you for your time here. And I am just so excited to learn more about what you're up to. I read your bio, of course, and the Listeners have heard the introduction and there's just so many juicy words in there that I'd love to learn more about. So I'm hoping in your own words, we could kick off this interview just by hearing from you about what Seven Leagues Leather is and does and what role you play. Sure.

So Seven Leagues is a leather innovation company. So we make fish leather that sustains people and the planet. We're looking to make, um, luxury wholesale leather, fish leather for apparel, soft goods, interior design companies. So we're trying to feed that market for companies that are looking for sustainable materials. And, um, 80% of our production is slated for wholesale sales. Then the other 20% will be for craftspeople, artisans, and eventually for our own brand of shoes, which are for the future. First thing we're headed for is just that wholesale leather production. Oh, wow.

I can't wait to double-click on so much of this stuff. And curious, how did you— I always love learning, especially from female entrepreneurs. I always love learning how the heck did you get into this and what, what led you down this path to where you are now?

Well, immediately before starting this company, I was actually working in overseas international development. I was doing gender Equality on a value-added agriculture project that was funded by the Canadian government in the Eastern Caribbean. And I came back from that wanting to make an impact at home and also just sort of chagrined by all of the issues that affect nonprofits. And I, I wanted to build a for-profit impact business and I wanted to do it at home. So I'd come home and I'm like, looking for that idea, and I encountered a group of environmental artists who were doing a display of a project they had done on small-scale hand-done fish leather. It was the first time I'd ever seen it, and I looked, and that was when I learned that it has 9 times the tensile strength per thickness as mammal leather. It's gorgeous. It's got this beautiful scale pocket pattern. And forgive the pun, but I was like, I bet you could scale this up.

I love puns, so bring it on.

I took a year and I researched the heck out of the idea. I found that there was indeed a market for this, that Prada, Gucci, Nike, BMW, and others have used fish leather. So it's very much a high-end luxury product. Nobody was doing it in North America at all. And then I did some fun and crazy things as part of my research. I went and worked in Europe in a small tannery. It wasn't a fish leather tannery. It was— they did other kinds of leather. But there was this guy that if you agreed to work for free, he'd give you room and board and teach you kind of what to do. And so I did that, and he was quite the lunatic. But I did return with all the fingers and toes that I left with. I learned some things to do and some things not to do. Then I took some samples of fish leather that I had sort of done by hand, à la the, the artists, and I went to shoe school in Toronto and I did a 10-day intensive shoemaking course to make a proof of concept pair of shoes. And then I wore those puppies every single day without fail for 6 months. Excuse me. And at the end of the 6 months, it was the poor quality thread that I had used. So the seams started to pop, but the leather was in great shape and that was straight through a Vancouver snowy, wet winter and fall. And, um, yeah, so then at the end of that year, between all of those experiences and the market research, I decided that this, this was a go, and I incorporated, and I've been working on it ever since.

Oh my gosh, that is so amazing, and I feel so proud of you. And I know we just met, it's really, really cool to hear how your lived experience in the Caribbean planted that seed for you. And then you came back and just, you know, happened to come across these artisans. And, you know, and then I feel like we get those inspired moments and sometimes we think, like, take off on them and sometimes we don't. And you've come quite a long way on your inspired moment. And I'm so curious, do you still wear the shoes? Like, that's a really cool test pilot. Like, when you think about test driving a car, they put them over all the bumps and they're in the lab, but I'm hearing you say you just like tested out your own product for a long time.

I mean, off and on, the, the, the seams are actually an issue. And I mean, I'm not a shoemaker and, and, and this is the thing, like people connect immediately to the shoes. Like there's a picture of them on the website and people are like, oh man, I want a pair of those shoes. The shoes are a little ways down the road because first we just need revenue and revenue. The fastest path to revenue is going to be wholesale leather. So the shoes are going to be a while. And I'll even put on the caveat that the pair of shoes I made was basically, it was a knockoff of a Clarks Desert Boot because the shoemaking teacher said that was the simplest shoe for someone who didn't know what they were doing to do.

Okay.

But in the long run, it'll actually be a Chelsea boot, which is like, um, in the Pacific Northwest, people tend to wear Blundstones.

Yeah.

Those are designed in Australia, made in sweatshops in Asia of chrome-tanned leather. There is nothing Pacific Northwest about them. So we want to take aim at kind of the high end of that and come up with a fish leather Chelsea boot that, um, uh, Pacific Northwesterners and others can wear. And the thing about having made the shoes myself was that because I was wearing them every day, like, I didn't allow myself to, to wear anything else. No matter what outfit I was wearing, those were the shoes that I was wearing. That's great. I remember going to meetings and you'd see people and their eyes would start to slide over to my feet and then they'd be like losing track of what was going on at the meeting because they're trying to check out my shoes. They ended up being a great conversation piece and a lot of fun.

Oh, no kidding. And yeah, let's go down the rabbit hole of Blundstones for a while. It's, I think it's affectionately referred to as the BC uniform. So I own several pairs and I have certain comments about the, the versions of which ones you can tell which ones were made in Australia and you can tell which ones were made when they offshored their production. And it's something that, you know, we talk about a lot on the podcast about decentralization and shopping more locally. And I know for sure if you came out with a Chelsea pair of boots I would be a really happy customer. I think that's so beautiful. And salmon is such a huge culture. And not to, you know, not to make the assumption that you're only making leather out of salmon. So I want to get into that in a second. And salmon, for those listening, we're both in British Columbia. It's such a huge part of our culture. So, and other fish is such a huge part of our culture. So that would be really special, I think, to be able to have access to those. So before we kind of dive into the technical side of things, I was hoping we could talk a little bit about— you were, I think, alluding a bit to community-based enterprises, or sometimes they're referred to as social enterprise. So what inspired you about that, and did you want to talk a little bit about that?

Sure. So initially my thought was, and going back to those artists who I encountered, Someone who was there at the presentation as well said, oh, I'm a chef, and people always try and put folks with barriers to employment in a kitchen. That's a really terrible place because meals have to happen on an absolute timescale, and it's very physical work. And she said, oh, you know, I wish that we could teach them how to make this fish leather and then buy the fish leather from them. And I thought, oh, she's sweet, but that does not scale to the kind of impact that's going to change someone's life. You would earn, you know, if you're doing this in a bucket in your kitchen, enough money maybe for a meal. What changes someone's life is a job.

Yeah.

And that was part of my initial impetus. But I'm 5 years into this, and the idea has evolved quite a lot. So the kind of impact I'm looking at now varies a little bit more. I'm looking at Indigenous partnerships. So in my supply chain, my first priority is always working with Indigenous fisheries I also work with other fisheries, and I'm already setting up that, that whole supply chain. But my first turn is always, where can I partner with Indigenous folks so that we have win-win solutions? Because people need jobs, they need employment, they need money. So, um, that's always where we start. And there are other places where we've got Indigenous partnerships, uh, designed. Uh, we have a vision for in the future that we want to help create and support the market for Indigenous leather makers by— if you want to make something out of our fish leather, we will help you sell it. You don't have to sell it under our name. It will be under your name, your nation, your everything. So we're not taking anything of that, but we're going to try and help you sell it. Um, that's another way. We've got a lot of different things. So the reason that I have pivoted from, oh, we're going to have folks in the tannery facing barriers to employment working, to how can we partner to leverage other people's initiatives so that we can make sure that they're remunerative and supportive. Part of that comes from that the minute you say social enterprise, people think you mean nonprofit. Mm-hmm. The case— there are nonprofit social enterprises, but there are also very profitable social enterprises. But the consistency of encountering people who are like, oh, if you're a social enterprise, I'm not interested in investing. I finally decided, okay, that's just not part of what we're doing at all. I still believe super strongly that we need an inclusive economy that brings everyone along, and that if the environmental— whether it's the environmental movement as a whole or whether it's eco-friendly products— carry on without including everyone for a shared prosperity, that the whole project is doomed. Because if you don't bring everyone along, people will vote against it, people will fight it, people won't be part of it. And this is urgent. We need everyone on board. Mm-hmm. So I still approach with that kind of thought, but how I work at it has changed because, um, the— because of the investment, uh, that, that's, that's pretty much it. Even impact investors, they want the exact same returns on the exact same timescale as something that treats any negative impact as an externality that like offloads all the environmental and social problems onto the charitable and public sector and just privatizes the money. And yet investors want— if they're an impact investor, they're like, oh yeah, we want you to make just as much money just as fast and do impact. And that's what we'll invest in.

Nothing like setting a high bar. And yeah, I hear you. Being in the nonprofit world for a while, there's definitely pros and cons to that model. And as we were talking about just offline before we started the podcast, You know, one of the key reasons that I started this podcast is that I believe in business, and I believe in the power of business, and I believe in creating space to have these kinds of conversations so that we can kind of debunk some of these things. And I'm— I believe that we all need to make that profit, and that's why I wanted to create that space to have this conversation and talk about social enterprise. And like, it's, it's a great point that you bring up that sometimes it's a really good fit, and I'm hearing for you that you just found that it was, um, a diff— you had a different approach to it and it doesn't make it one way or the other, like let one's good and one's bad. It's all good and we all need it. And, and you're right, like we need to bring everyone along. So kudos to you for having that mindset right from the beginning. Cause I certainly think if you're an established business, it's harder to shift mid, mid, midstream, no pun intended.

Please keep them coming. Keep them coming. We'll just keep fishing for good answers.

Oh my gosh. Let's dive into the environmental impacts. So this is too fun. You mentioned chrome, so I'm not sure for those listening, if they're not familiar, chromium is and its derivatives are used in lots of different processes, industrial processes, including fixing color. Into textiles and also in the tanning process. And it is extremely toxic in high concentrations, which commonly comes out of these factories as effluent. And so if they're not treated properly, that's basically where chrome gets in, in high concentrations, out into the waterways and can have a lot of environmental impact. So thank you for bringing that forward. And I'm— I don't know much about tanning. I know more about textiles. So I'd really love to hear from your perspective, what kinds of impacts on the environment does tanning, like traditional tanning practices, have?

Yeah. So, I mean, I'll start off with you can make leather or preserve skin in a whole lot of ways. So like starting off with the traditional artisanal, do-it-at-home stuff, you can do everything from like a kitchen ingredient leather made from eggs and oil to a higher yuck factor traditional practices like making leather with urine or with brains.

Okay.

Say that every animal is born with enough brains to tan its skin. So I don't do any of those things. I just want to put it out there that these are not any of the ways that I make leather. And those are actually not ways that scale up to commercial production anyway. If you know, the difference between being an artisan who's doing this in their kitchen or in their backyard versus being a company that does stuff at a large enough scale that you can have impact. And that is definitely my goal. You have to have something that can be done at scale and something that, that also provides complete consistency so that if someone is a business is purchasing your product, they know that it's going to be the same thickness, the same whatever. Mm-hmm. Well, 90% of leather currently is, as you said, chrome tanned. So that's done with trivalent chromium or so, chrome 3. And if this isn't done with all of the very expensive, extensive protections around it, both for the people and for the effluent, that is potentially cancer-causing and polluting and just inexcusably terrible. Not to mention the fact that It's— chrome is a— it's a metal. It's a non-renewable resource. And it's just— it's not a good way to do things. But 100 years ago, people discovered that you could make leather with chrome and that it is quick and it is cheap and it takes very little skill. So that is why 100 years later, 80 to 90% of leather is chrome tanned. However, what we do is called veg tanning. Sounds like you do it with broccoli. That's not the case. So plants have tannins. The plants actually produce tannins to defend themselves from microbial and fungal attack. So the great thing about using tannins to make leather is that then the leather has that same antimicrobial, antifungal property to it. So when you're wearing something against your skin, you could have it with cancer-causing chrome, or you could have it with antimicrobial and antibacterial tannins. Plants are also a renewable resource. So, and, and so this is, we're driving towards biodegradability, full biodegradability in the process is, is what our end goal is. So anyway, we use plant tannins. People have been tanning leather with plants for thousands of years. It gives the word tanning leather in English because it's been around for that long. Although there have been a lot of changes and improvements in the, the processes that are done. So currently about 10% of leather is chrome— is, sorry, is veg tanned. It tends to be sort of higher end. Um, there are honestly pros and cons. In addition to chrome tanning being quicker, cheaper, easier, it is also stable to a higher temperature. So veg tanned leather is probably only good to about 80 degrees °C. Sorry, Fahrenheit listeners, I can't do the translation.

They're at 32°F.

But, but veg tanning has the, the asset that this is a renewable resource. This is— it's, it's better for the planet. It doesn't do things like with the trivalent chromium. If you heat it, it could potentially turn into hexavalent chromium, which is much, much worse. And The interesting thing is that here in Canada, there are no tanneries left because when Canada increased the environmental regulations on chrome, it became completely unrealistic and uneconomic to meet them. So all of the tanneries simply closed. So the tanning industry left. And, and so we still buy leather that's chrome tanned. It's mostly done in poor countries that don't have the ability to protect their land and people. Or it's done high-end in Europe where they have invested in all the protection, although EU regulations are tightening further and it's going to be harder and harder to do that at all in Europe in the coming years. So we import this stuff and la la la la, don't tell me the impact of how my leather got made. But when we put our trash in the landfill, which is what happens in North America, landfills heat up. So it has the potential even to be changing from trivalent chromium to hexavalent chromium, which is another disaster. So we just don't do any of that. We work with, um, plant tannins currently. I use an imported tannin from Peru that comes from a seed pod. When I discovered that I was having to import tree products to British Columbia, which is a little bit like bringing sand to the Sahara, I went to the forest sector and I presented my research and said, my market research says that there's a turn away from chrome tanning. There will be an increasing market for vegetable tannins, and we should be able to make this here. They validated my research with the University of Northampton. I'm quite proud to say that my do-it-yourself research was validated by the university.

Congratulations. Thank you.

And so, they're now working, FPI, Forest Products Innovation, which is a Canadian national public-private partnership for innovation in the forest sector, is working on redeveloping a hemlock tannin plant here in British Columbia. And if it goes forward, that'll be Indigenous-owned. So yet again, another connection to my desire to support innovation that supports all British Columbians, all Canadians, all people.

That is incredible. I love it. In the, in your intro, I said from sea to tree. So thank you for bringing that forward. And do you have a timeline on when that might hit the markets or be viable for you?

For the tannin, that's a little bit out of my hands because that's not actually Seven Leagues propelling that particular project.

Fair enough.

More I came, I gave my, my research and I said I would really like to buy this product if you would make it. So that one is, is working through. I know it's not only FPI, Forest Products Innovation, that's working on it. It has the support of the iBio, which is the Indigenous bioeconomy branch of the provincial forestry department. So it's got some government push behind it as well. But I am not in control of their timeline.

Fair enough. And super valid. And that's, that's, I guess, one of the questions that came to mind when you were talking about that is they must have also identified other, well, have they identified other market potentials for that tannin in order to invest in that and scale it up?

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's the leather market, but there are other uses for tannins as well. So yeah, they, they looked at that. My, what I gave them was simply the leather market. But they, they looked and beyond the leather market, there are, there are other markets as well, but no one is producing hemlock tannin at the moment. So that would be new, new to market, although not entirely new because up until the 1960s we did have a hemlock tannin production unit in, in the province.

Okay. So it's kind of like revising and maybe rebooting and updating an older technology.

Yeah.

Love it. The innovator is innovating and pushing other innovators.

We got to all move together. Yeah.

Which is fantastic. And then when you were talking about the properties of tannins, I was thinking I'm thinking, huh, does that make me antimicrobial if I drink enough wine because it's got a lot of tannins in it?

I hope so. I absolutely hope so.

Awesome. Well, I'd love to move on to the next question that I had for you. And I know that you have a proprietary process, and I was also just super interested to learn that, um, you know, in talking to you and also reading that you have a commercial facility that you've scaled up, obviously away from what you were sharing earlier is the artisan level. And I'm really curious to hear a little bit about that process or anything that you feel comfortable sharing with us that's not proprietary.

Yeah. So yeah, we imported machinery during the shipping crisis of the pandemic. So that was really exciting. That was where I had reached the point with the business where if I was really going to do this, I needed the machinery, but the machinery is expensive. Maybe I shouldn't do this. And anyway, I finally decided, yes, I'm going to do this. So I, I went initially with the smallest machinery that I could get to start with because my, my first conception of the business was to bootstrap it again. I've moved on from that at the moment as well, but I bought a new tanning drum from Germany where, I mean, you can't beat German engineering.

It's a beautiful machine.

So I got that and then I got a couple of pieces of repurposed Italian tanning machinery. So machinery that had been used and was fixed and, and resold. So one of them being a buffer, which the role of the buffer is to make sure that everything is exactly the same thickness. So again, that's for industrial application. If someone's making a bazillion purses, they need to make sure that everything is exactly the same on the back. So we have a buffer to make sure that everything is kind of buffed to the same thickness and a good backing. We have a glazing jack, which the purpose of the glazing jack is, it's like a, if you imagine a glass ball that's on a mechanical arm and it pushes and pulls waxes and oils up to the surface to make a water-resistant coating that is completely biodegradable and natural. It's just waxes and oils. It puts a a lovely gloss on it. And this is part of— there are other fish tanneries in the world, and a lot of them will use, uh, just an acrylic glaze. Well, I would never put plastic on a natural product. This is a way of having a shiny surfacing that is biodegradable, natural. But the machine can do that. You just wouldn't have the hand strength to do that. And so the machine does this in, in a consistent way. So we did that and, um, and a series of test drums so that even once we have a particular formula set and we're producing that, we can still be doing constant innovation in the background to change. We're looking at not only— you need a different formula for every different fish. So we are starting with salmon, but we also want to look at, you know, can we make lingcod leather? Can we make tuna leather? Can we make halibut leather? So we're intending those other things too, but we have to do— because every fish is a little bit different. Actually, crazy thing. Every place you are is a little bit different because the water and the air are different. I spoke at one point. Okay, I did warn you I'd go on bird walks. This is good. I found the vice president of what was previously the biggest tanning company in Canada. Again, it got closed down when regulations changed, but they had tanneries set up in Edmonton, in Winnipeg, somewhere in Ontario and in Pennsylvania. And he said that they had a different, slightly different formula in each of those places, even between Edmonton and Winnipeg, that you had to change things because the water is a little bit different. So same thing, not only is the water different, but every fish species is different. And wherever it lives, it's got sort of, you know, what the French would call the terroir, you know, it has the attributes of the places that it's lived and been. And so you have to adjust the formula for that.

Mm-hmm. That makes so much sense. I just listened— well, I attended a Meadowlark Festival talk last weekend with Dr. Theresa Ryan, who is an Indigenous researcher in forestry at the University of British Columbia. And she was talking about how her nation specifically harvests the candlefish, they're called, and I'm just blanking on the actual name of them. And she was saying the same thing, like how they have a very specific process that only really works in that area because of the range of the fish and the water. And yeah, it's so fascinating. And I'm glad that you mentioned which fish that you— fishes, fishies, fish that you're looking at, because that was my first thought is, you know, when you think about tanning a hide, I think most commonly a vision of like a cowhide would come up. So, you know, it's quite big and obviously other makers can cut a lot of pieces out of it. And so my brain was like, oh, I wonder how they do that with like the smaller, say, a salmon. A halibut obviously can get massive. So that's kind of cool. Like, so do you feel like, um, halibut would be like your cowhide equivalent for size and shape? Or do you have— and then the other question I have is, do you have specific, um, retailers that are looking for different wholesale products that would match efficiently with the different fish that you're looking at doing.

Yeah. So I mean, one thing is you can and we eventually will make sheets of fish leather as well. You can attach them because if you imagine, like if you look at half of a fish, it's kind of roughly a triangle.

Yeah.

So if you put your triangles end to side so that you're kind of alternating, you can attach those whether you sew them, glue them, whatever, and you can make sheets. So we will sell some sheets for those who want to pay the extra for us to do that for them. Or you can either make smaller goods, whether it's phone cases or watch bands or belts or wallets, or you can piece them together in whatever way that you might. There's been some interesting work done. I know someone who has been using computer modeling to make the patterns that have— it's the same stuff that other pattern makers will use to ensure that there is the least amount of waste.

Exactly.

Using similar kind of programs to optimize the use of the fish according to their size and shape. So there's all different things that can be done on that end. And yes, it depends on the size of the fish. I probably mainly wouldn't bother with really small fish, although every fish has a different scale pocket pattern. And we did get, as we're doing R&D still, we did get some rockfish rockfish sent to us, and some of them were fairly small, but they had super cool scale pocket patterns. So I'm like, oh yeah, you know, I think we gotta have the rockfish too. So it all depends, but certainly we're, we're doing different species of fish than other fish leather producers are. The Europeans are all doing farmed Atlantic salmon because that's what Europeans have. We aren't with farmed salmon at all, both because of the problems of fish farms in our waters, that that's just not something that we want to support. We want to like make a specific decision to support sustainable wild catch and the communities that depend on that. But also because that differentiates us. Again, you know, they've got a farmed product, they've got just something different, whereas this is about Pacific Northwest wild and our particular resource economy and whatnot. So that's where the hemlock fits in. That's where I'm kind of excited about a potential— at the start of the process, you have to clean the skins with something, and we do use hydrated lime, some hydrated lime in that process. You can make hydrated lime out of oyster shells, and we have a huge oyster industry here too. So wouldn't it be cool if we could even have that coming from here? But then at the same time, as much as we're focused on the connections here and the things here, we're also developing the business as a model that can be replicated elsewhere, and we intend to replicate globally. So we're building around this. But if we were to take this same model and have then a Seven Leagues in another country, whether it's in the UK or whether it's in Costa Rica or wherever where they have fish. And so it would be again near fish processing. So we're looking at supply chains and nearshoring production and making it clear where, where the material is coming from and making sure that we only work with sustainable catch. So we're looking at whether it's MSC certified or Ocean Wise certified or some other way to certify that we're we're, we're working with the good guys and we're working responsibly, but that this can be done elsewhere. And so like, I think it would be cool the same way that I mentioned we are intending to make a market and help say indigenous leather workers sell their wares. What about like Celtic designs from, you know, somewhere in the UK if we, if we have a Seven Leagues UK? And what about, I don't know, Polynesian designs because we've got one in Hawaii. Who knows?

Yeah, that's, uh, I think such a beautiful vision to carry for the replication. So, you know, traditional scale-up is like, how big can we make this thing? And, um, I love seeing more circular economy examples, which is what we've kind of been talking about. Um, but also that is that it's a system, it's a package that could be transported somewhere else that has its own culture, like the like you just shared, Celtic, I was thinking about the Philippines or Bali or other places that, you know, eat a lot of fish, even Japan, and what kinds of products they could make on their end when they're looking at how do we capture this waste from a fishing industry, for example, or, and then funneling it through into fashion or household goods or whatever, whatever they want to do. I think that's a really exciting vision. And so for the people that are listening that might not be super familiar with circular economy. Did you want to talk a little bit about that from your perspective with your process and products? I mean, I know we've kind of been touching on it a little, but—

Yeah, sure. So in circular economy, I'm probably not going to come up with the official, you know, Ellen MacArthur definition, but basically you're looking at how do you keep resources in use instead of in the trash. Mm-hmm. So whatever you've got, you're trying to figure out, can I reuse this? Can I upcycle this? Can I repurpose this? Can I take part of it? Can I take all of it? And how do I keep that working within the system? And so you're looking at things being circular in the sense that it comes from here, it gets used here. When it's done here, can I use it here? So this is kind of what we're looking at. And you've already heard some of my inspiration, so A fish fillet is about 50% of a fish, so that leaves the other half of the fish as waste or byproduct. It does get some use, a lot of it kind of low value. It gets put into dog treats or sometimes into fertilizer, stuff like that. So that is use. A lot of it does go directly to the landfill as well. I don't have exact numbers because Canada just does not count fish waste. They don't keep track of it. There are no statistics on it. I got a project approved for some grad students at UBC to look into it, but couldn't get anyone to fund this. So I can't cite specific statistics, which is a big frustration to me because the Europeans all can. They all keep track of their fish waste. I even have a colleague in Kenya who's able to say how much fish waste there is in Kenya and what his tannery is taking care of from Nile perch in Lake Victoria. So Canada is very behind on keeping track of stuff like that. But that said, you can look at the 50% of the fish that is wasted. So this is a way of not only reusing it, but to use it at its highest value, highest purpose. And a fabulous statistic that I love comes out of Iceland where they have have a national policy of 100% fish use, and they try to make sure that every fish that Iceland lands, 100% of it gets used, and it gets used to its highest value. So they're looking a lot at cosmetics and pharmaceuticals and also fish leather. And what they found was that between 1981 and 2018, the size of their catch fell by 40%, but the value of their catch only fell by about 15% because they were pushing all that stuff up the value chain. And so for those who don't take the environmental value seriously of you got to use everything, like if you've taken this fish, you should use 100% of it, then perhaps the monetary idea that you can make a lot more money out of it if you don't throw it away might be significant. So I think it's important for both of those reasons.

Oh, wow. Well, yeah, you just landed the plane on circularity. I think, I think you nailed it. So great work. And it kind of reminds me of my ex-sister-in-law who used to love sucking the eyeballs out of the fish that we would cook. And it's like this Asian perspective versus North American perspective, just to like very broadly and crudely generalize that that, you know, we, we throw away a lot of the good parts, um, according to them. So it depends on your perspective. And, uh, it's again just another example of how important policy is to drive innovation. And we see that so much in textiles and, and other industries. But, you know, speaking of textiles, what an awesome example of Iceland And so if you have that, you know, the carrot and the stick analogy where you have people like yourselves that are the carrot, like you're chasing the carrot, you're, you're doing the right thing, you're a leader, you're innovating, you're building these markets literally as you go. And I feel like unless there's a policy or the stick component of that, that's also pushing people along, it can be really challenging to to do it. And thankfully for yourself, you're just obviously very well informed and super passionate and really motivated. So I'm so impressed by how much of that market creation and like driving innovation that you've already done. And let's hope that Canada hops on board with something like, uh, with like Iceland. It would be such an amazing policy to have in place and what things would come out of it. And really great point too that you've shared that but it's a way of buffering as well. Like at baseline conversation about why this is good is that it sounds from your story that even though there was a decline in their fisheries, it still didn't have a huge impact on them. And that, that's so amazing because obviously, you know, in Canada we have a really long and tumultuous history with DFO and fisheries and all kinds of things that have happened with folks that do that as a living. And so, you know, we're in this— I feel like we're in this super clunky time in Canada for, you know, seeing the right direction and trying to get more speed going within the government processes to put in some of these really important policies that do support the circular economy. And exactly what you're talking about, how do we not throw things away but use them for their highest good. And, and use them— and I love your example so much— and use them in a way that doesn't create an impact at the end of its life. So, you know, I wanted to ask you to close the loop of the circular economy conversation. So you have social inclusion, you have innovation, you have new, um, processes that you're using that are non-toxic, you're creating a product that's biodegradable? And what happens to— like, what would you recommend somebody if they had like a leather belt or something of your product? How do you suggest they close the loop with your products at the end?

That's a ways down, down the, the pipe.

I know, I'm asking the tough questions.

We're not selling it yet, but we are designing it to be biodegradable or as close to biodegradable as we can possibly get it. Where, I mean, when we've talked about the shoes, because even though they're in the future, we have done a lot of talk and dreaming about them. We're looking at, you know, shoe construction that can be deconstructed and repaired. And so yeah, in everything that we design, because it needs to be intentional design, we're designing things so that, that end of, end of life is, is taken into consideration either for reuse or biodegradability. But I mean, I wanted to pick up on that policy piece because that's something that gets lost a lot. And when I compare, for instance, with the European fish tanneries, they get their fish skins much more easily and at a lower cost than I do because waste is disincentivized. It's— it's— you get charged a lot for waste in Europe. Whereas we're still a throwaway society here so much that if you process fish at sea, you are legally allowed to just toss the extra overboard, which I've asked the question a number of times, is that a good thing? Because then the rest of the fish get to eat the fish parts, or is that a bad thing because it lands in such a heap that it's a protein overload? I have heard anecdotally from people sort of who are in marine biology who've said, you know, it's that second it's the overload, but I haven't gotten any official reports on that. But I've also talked to people in fisheries who say, yeah, well, you know, we don't want to have to pay to get rid of it, even though the payment here is small. So boats sometimes go out into the bay in the middle of the night and dump it. We are not regulating our waste. And I work with an Icelandic consultant on the fish leather tannery, and he was shocked by the price that I am going to be paying for the fish skins because I have to make it more attractive to sell it to me than to throw it out. And at the moment, throwing it out is so cheap and so easy here that that's the more attractive thing for fish processors to do. So the government has a role there.

Mm-hmm. Well, that's a great point. Thank you for picking up on that. I appreciate it. And it's, it's an important topic to keep, keep forefront and center and continue to bring awareness to it because I do believe things change. And as you said, we're just in this process of like we need to accelerate things and accelerate these changes. And so, you know, one of my questions I often get into with guests is about tradeoffs. And I was curious— and I think you just shared one. So the trade-offs conversation is if you're trying to be an eco-conscious business, what kind of trade-offs do you struggle with, meaning decisions that are less ideal or choices that you have to make because of exactly what you're just talking about. Maybe there's a lack of policy or the economy wants something or your markets are asking for something or even a social mindset. So besides the lack of policy around fish waste, do you have any other tradeoffs that you'd like to share with us and talk about?

Sure. I mean, one of the things that customers really want is a waterproof leather. Well, currently most of the ways you would make a waterproof leather would either involve plastics or forever chemicals, and we're not willing to do either of those. So as I had outlined, at the moment what we're doing is a wax and oil finish. Which isn't going to last forever. But I mean, anyone who truly loves leather, you know, recoats their leather anyway eventually. And we need to get back to that. We've gotten a bit lazy, I think, in modern times where we expect we buy it one way and then, you know, we're done. We don't do anything. Whereas in the old days, people, people used to wax their boots.

Yeah, like go for a shoeshine.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So at the moment we're there. So like, I know there are some customers who are like, oh well, I just want the waterproof, but those are arguably not going to be our customers anyway. And we're also hoping for innovation in the future moving forward that we can come up with a biodegradable waterproof coating so that in the future we can have our cake and eat it too. There we can do both. But for the moment we have to do that. There are other tradeoffs with For instance, I got in a discussion with another tanner who I know, and so he makes beautiful buffalo carpets. So basically he tans hair on buffalo skins that people buy to be like a rug in their, in their house. And so a rug in your house is never, ever going to get wet. I mean, aside from a spilled glass that you quickly clean up or something. If you're going to be making leather for shoes in one of the wettest cities on the planet, that is to say Vancouver where I live, then you do have to worry a little bit more about could mold get on something. So do you add a small amount of something that will mitigate that or do you not? And he was like, oh well, you, you know, you can't call it natural leather if you've done anything to combat you know, mold. And I'm like, says Mr. with his buffalo carpets in a living room that are never going to meet water. But that's the kind of trade-off that durability is part of sustainability. And so if something is going to fall apart or rot and then you have to make it again and you think of all the energy that goes into making it again and all the cost and all the etc., a small amount of something that makes it sure that that's going to last a long time is, I think, a kind of trade-off that probably I would make. Again, we're still finalizing formulas and stuff, but those are the sort of conversations that one has.

Mm-hmm. Well, that's an excellent example of a trade-off. And, you know, if anyone listening knows about the hierarchy of waste, one of the things is durability and an excellent example of of like sustainability in action. So if you had to choose over something that would fall apart in a year or that would last, I don't know, 30 years, like my Birkenstocks that are still going and starting to fall apart slowly, um, that is, you know, what is the sustainable choice there? And there's many. Sustainability is so nuanced. And I've always been a fan of leather, aside from the chrome conversation, because that it is so durable and it lasts forever. So you could literally— like, I think my dad had a pair of Birkins, just as on the Birkenstock example, had a pair that was 50 years old. So it's really— and I love the durability conversation as well, because as a business, that forms how you market your product and also the services that you offer after. You know, some people might say, oh, if you make something really durable, you're never going to sell enough to maintain your business. But it also, I think, in a circular economy model, you have to start shifting your mindset too and think about, well, what kind of services are you going to offer those folks? And if you look at Birkenstocks as an example, you can recork them, you can have like the new, you can have a new upper put in, you can resole them and like just keep, keep them keeping on. So I'm excited to hear what you discover. I know that kind of poked you in a forward direction that where you're not really at yet with your business. So I'm super excited to hear what you, what you come up with. And great testing grounds— Vancouver is hecka wet all the time, and yeah, it would be an interesting thing to have your shoes mold.

So ours aren't going to.

No, of course not. Let's, uh, let's banish that. So, um, one of the fun things I love to ask my guests— I'm a big visionary person, and I love hearing what other people's visions are for their businesses. So if you can just like pick up a paintbrush or a magic wand and create your like ideal future vision for Sevenleagues, what do you think that would look like?

Absolutely. So 10 years from now, my vision is we have Sevenleagues in at least 3 different countries in the world. So Vancouver and then 2 other places. We're selling to high-end brands. So I really want to see our product, whether it's in a Patagonia or a Lacoste or, you know, some sort of fashion brand like that that we're supplying them. I see that one vision that I've got is kind of riffing off the microbrewery model is I would like to bring leather tanning out into the public the same way that microbreweries have people talking about hops and malt as if they know what they're talking about and that they'll, you know, sit beside the gleaming distillery equipment to sip their beer and they learn something. And so we're actually talking to Granville Island about having a small microprocess, you know, facility there where people can actually see what's going on. And we can surface these conversations about how is your leather made? Because people think, oh, leather bad or leather good, or— and it's like, no, no, no, there's way more nuance. How are you making your leather? So we want to surface those conversations. We want to surface the conversations about, um, uh, fishery-dependent communities and how to include them in the economy and all of these things. So the idea of having a small facility there that people are visiting that gets lots of traffic, and that's also where we could move those goods like the, um, leather goods from other makers and where you could order your shoes. And so that would be sort of the public front-facing. Then in the background, we are going to have larger production facility in someplace that's less visible just because it's, it's expensive to be in a high tourist traffic visible place. But bring that conversation out and get people excited. So that would be part of it as well as our other production units near other fisheries places. And then the other thing that I really dream of is that we revive leather tanning in Canada and in North America. In that right now in Canada, I will give you as an example, City of Guelph, which is trying to fashion itself as Canada's circular city. They did a study to figure out what's happening to the hides of cattle that's butchered for the food, for food in Ontario. According to their study, at the moment, 100% of those skins are going directly to the landfill. So when we don't make leather, one is the impact of that amount of off-gassing in the landfill is just horrible and unacceptable. And I see Canada as— because we're not making leather the wrong way, because we're not making it at all, we are well positioned to restart this industry and make it in the right way and make a specialty of ethical leather in Canada that we can say, okay, unlike Brazil, where deforestation is part of their cattle industry That's not as much of a problem in Canada. So we can say, okay, the supply of these is not causing deforestation, and our methods, because we're not involved in the wrong way of doing it, are the highest. And we could have this beautiful, high-quality, ethical leather industry in Canada. And there is so much innovation happening in leather right now, most of it in Europe actually, where they're coming up with better and better ways universities to do things. And so I want some of that. It's actually clean tech innovation going on. I would like to see some of that clean tech in some of our universities. So part of my vision is that Seven Leagues kicks off a Canadian interest in that kind of research so that we're at the cutting edge of natural dyes, of leather tanning, of biodegradable waterproof coatings. That we're working on sustainable textiles.

Oh, I can 100% get behind that. I think that's a beautiful vision. Thank you so much for articulating that and sharing it. And yeah, Granville Island is such a magical place, and I feel like you would just do so much good there in raising awareness of your processes and opening people's minds to the possibility of just different ways that are better for the environment, for leather, for making this leather. And, you know, stitch all those themes together, like the cultural side of fish and indigenous practices and small-scale fisheries. Like, yeah, it's beautiful. There's so much possibility.

We even have already drawn up— we commissioned a study on a circular water system so that we could treat the water and reuse it. Equipment, because one legitimate critique of veg tanning is it does take a lot of water. It's a water-intensive process, but I have a plan done up so that we would have like a 3-tiered reed bed system with also some other equipment in there to clean. And so, yeah, my vision is there we are on Granville Island and we can talk about, yes, and the water goes through the reed bed and it comes back and we reuse it.

Amazing. I love it. I knew this was going to be a good interview. Thank you so much, Tasha. I am, uh, I really truly hope that your, uh, vision gets fully articulated to beyond the point than you ever could have imagined. So I truly believe that is gonna happen for you and is possible. And if anyone's listening and they have a little piece of that puzzle for you, I would love them to get in touch with you. So can you share how, how to do Sure, we have a website, 7leagues.com.

So that's the number 7, not the word 7. So the number 7, L-E-A-G-U-E-S dot com. And you should definitely sign up for our newsletter. We only put out 4 a year. And so we try to concentrate on quality over quantity. And so if you sign up for that, you'll hear from us only 4 times per year. And you'll also know when we manage to make it to market and what's going on with us. Um, we're also on Facebook and on Instagram and on LinkedIn, so Seven Leagues Leather, you can find us in all of those places. But our social media is completely different from our newsletter, so those give you different kinds of information and at different time scales.

Awesome. And I always encourage folks to get on newsletters because from a business perspective, that's actually only the asset It's the only asset you own. So it's really supportive to small business and other businesses, but specifically for small business, if you can hop on their newsletter and support them that way. So thank you again so much. It's been such a pleasure having you. I have learned so much about so many important details about this process and what you're up to and the innovations you've been having. And I know for sure will continue to have and drive this, drive this forward for Canada. Very grateful to have you here.

Oh, thank you so much for inviting me and what a fun conversation. And I would love to hear from people. If they're interested, reach on out.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. And I look forward to having an update. Terrific.

Thank you.

Okay.

Bye.

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