Working with fashion industry data has made me insane, so... Rough breakdown of the often deliberately misleading/marketing-guff terms:
Leather - Ostensibly something containing tanned animal hide but in practice also applies to faux and pleathers.
Bonded Leather - What OP is talking about specifically. Like with pleathers and plant based leathers, this is primarily made of polymer glue, with scrap leather fibers used as 'structural filler' in the same way gravel is used to make concrete or grasses are used to make mud bricks. The fill material basically just exists to give the plastic something to stick to for strength. This is what plant based leathers are actually claiming to be "more environmentally friendly/ethical" than and are usually correct! Otherwise, frequently by omission, they're doing a spot of greenwashing.
Plant Leather - Replace the animal bits with plant bits. May or may not still undergo chemical treatments to "look like" high-grade leather (this is worse, see below), but it's still ultimately bonded.
Pleather - Deliberately sounds a bit like it's plant leather doesn't it? This is often just plastics held together with plastics.
Real Leather - Technically made "from" actual tanned animal hide, but still encompasses bonded.
Genuine leather - Exact meaning depends on how old the leather is, long ago it was a mark of quality but since it has no set meaning was adopted by the cheapest possible cuts of leather and become synonymous with that. Now also technically includes bonded sorry.
100% Leather - Not bonded! May still be low-grade 'genuine leather'. Any % less than 100% means its bonded.
[X]% recycled leather - not 100%? Greenwashing bonded, the polymer glue is still new. Probably still better than "new" bonded? The state of recycling is another can of worms.
Bycast Leather - Basically bonded. Plastic.
Reclaimed Leather - Basically bonded. Plastic.
Reconstituted Leather - Literally just bonded. Plastic.
Patent leather - usually low-grade leather covered in polymers with artificial dying or high-intensity chemical+heat treatments to give it the "skin" appearance of high-grade leather - this process is usually called Corrected Grain. Plastic. So much.
Full-grain leather - actual high grade cuts of leather. No artifical coatings or dyes. Frequently more expensive than god, whether used or new. Very resource intensive. You can only get so much of this out of each entire adult cow and even then not even every adult cow, that's years of resources and why the other 80% of the animal's skin is used in all the other categories to make it worthwhile (as well as the rest of the body going towards meat etc. typically).
Top-grain leather - similar to full-grain, actually leather, but slightly less fancy often coated in polymer for a cleaner look and with Corrected Grain treatments... Less plastic than bonded, still a lot of plastic.
Basically all of these are chasing the percieved prestige of full-grain leather with almost never actually achieving the characteristics of full-grain leather (durability, breathability etc.). That pursuit is absolutely sodden with polluting chemicals, and dipped in plastic.
At least in the EU some of this is required to be specified on product labeling thanks to some relatively recent legislation (for all clothing compositions, not just leather), and in some countries also the origin of that leather. Often international brands will include it elsewhere anyway.
In short, unless you're paying out of your arse (...not that price is even an indicator by itself) you're probably buying something which is no less plastic than elastine or polyester blended fibers (don't get me started). It's still an improvement over pure-plastic pleather garbage, but acting like it's Actually Really Environmentally Friendly is a bit disingenuous.
I know leather is seen as Cool As Fuck but honestly most of this hardly seems worth it yknow?
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