Willow Earth (cotton canvas offcut wallets)

Willow Earth (Sussex) is a brand that makes nice cotton canvas rucksacks and totes, with cork detailing. It then uses the offcuts, to make pretty cotton canvas wallets, in many colours.

Most people have a wallet or coin purse. But previous brands tended to be made from leather or plastic. Leather is obviously made from animal skin, and is not a by-product of the meat industry. It tends to also be chemically tanned, and often made in countries with poor animal welfare.

Plastic is made from oil, and this contributes to the climate crisis and pollution, and also doesn’t biodegrade at end of use, ending up on landfills for hundreds or thousands of years.

You can donate unwanted wallets and purses to charity shops (choose smaller ones that don’t test on animals) or textile banks. If items are in good condition they are donated on. But other textiles can be kept out of landfills, as the materials are shredded to make insulation and other goods.

You can also choose a pure ‘cork wallet’. Cork has a similar texture to leather, and does not require trees to be chopped down. The bark is simply stripped from trees in the Mediterranean every nine years.

Keeping the cork industry alive (in a world of plastic wine corks) is important, as it keeps jobs in the forest, which in turn protects wildlife, so the trees are not replaced by others, to be chopped down for industry.