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# Pomegranate skin, pressed into leather
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/pomegranate-leather/
- Published: 2026-09-02T03:33:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-05T04:43:22.000Z
- Description: Turkey grows a great many pomegranates, and the peel has always been the part nobody wanted. Two people decided that was the interesting bit.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Innovations, All stories

Juice a pomegranate and you are left holding most of the fruit. The peel is thick, bitter and useless to almost everybody, and it goes out with the waste in quantities that are hard to picture until you visit a juicing region. At ITU ARI Teknokent in Istanbul, a biomaterials company called Yugen has spent years working out what else that peel could be, and the answer is a leather. Their material, Pomeco, is made from pomegranate peel waste, and it is now commercially ready rather than a laboratory curiosity, going into fashion, furniture and car interiors. It was founded by İpek Tüysüzoğlu, who was named Turkey's woman social impact entrepreneur, and the material took first prize at the country's automotive design competition, which is a useful signal, because car interiors are one of the hardest tests a material can be put to.

What makes it interesting is not only what it is made from but how. The process runs without solvents and without water, which are the two things that make conventional tanning such a heavy industry and such a problem for the rivers near it. The company puts the material at ninety per cent biocontent, and the carbon saving at ninety per cent against conventional leather and sixty per cent against the artificial kind. Those are their figures rather than independent ones, and worth holding lightly, but the direction is plain enough. Somewhere a truck that used to carry peel to a tip is now carrying it to a factory, and something that had one short life as a drink is getting a second, much longer one as a chair, a bag or a car seat.

Sources and links

Our short take: reporting drawn from the Enterprise Europe Network partnering listing for Yugen, the Rethinking Materials start up profile, and Turkish coverage of the automotive design award. Emissions figure is the company's own. Photograph: Ivar Leidus, CC BY-SA 4.0.

- [Rethinking Materials](https://www.rethinkingmaterials.com)Where Pomeco is profiled alongside other new materials.
- [Yeditepe University: first prize for the pomegranate material](https://eng.yeditepe.edu.tr/en/announcements/first-prize-pomegranate-based-leather-alternative-material)The announcement of the automotive design award.