Just added these sources about paper sizing to the post https://www.perfectpapercompany.co.uk/blogs/news/vegan-papers Surface sizing solutions consist of mainly modified starches and sometimes other hydrocolloids, such as gelatine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sizing
ambiguous_yelp
joined 1 month ago
I'm sorry you saw that stuff on the matrix its not what I stand for
But we are all individually part of a boycott and thats why Michelin tyres exist, if all vegans ignored Michelin tyres and got whatever other tyres then they would probably stop making them, on the contrary if vegans as a bloc only bought Michelin tyres then that would be a strong market signal that Michelin has done a good thing and that other manufacturers should follow
Isn't this just completely ignoring supply and demand, what about the animal slaughter rates in Germany where there's loads of vegans. I bet it's easier to find weird vegan things there like a vegan book binder. I agree that the cultural effect exists that youre talking about thats why I think for example if you have preowned leather products you should replace them as soon as possible to avoid the signalling effect that leather is acceptable. I also think that emailing companies about this is not symbolic as it shows there is a demand, like think about michelin recently saying theyre going to make vegan tyres that was the result of market research, and now theres like an exponential knock on effect where we can say to vegans hey only buy these michelin tyres and before you know it all tyres will be vegan by default
Thats called the radical flank effect: the theory is that 20% of activists do 80% of the effective work and they provide a base for moderate vegans to onboard new vegans from, think of it like a curve where at each step of the way there is the option to go further, this is generally how radicalisation works but here the more effect work is down by the radical flank of veganism the longer and broader the tail of that curve becomes, for example think about how there now exists vegan tyre options from Michelin, that is infinitely better than if there wasn't, and the fact that major restaurants all provide vegan options, it makes it harder and harder to justify the killing in more and more cirumstances, in your case you went vegetarian but because there is a radicalisation curve at each stage you were probably presented with more opportunities to take it further
Thank you very much I hope to raise awareness and put more pressure on companies
Isn't buying vegan things a type of action though, otherwise whats the point of veganism as a boycott at all, we know that boycotting animal products has got us this far why not take it as far as practicible
Thank you, I'm not sure if its every Micheliln tyre but they certainly released at least one vegan tyre product youll have to double check!
ok i will try to be considerate
Yeah I put this at the end notes of the post :) I get them too from uk they ship to a few countries
I'm so happy to hear that! (ive never heard of wild cosmetics maybe theyre not in the UK) but yeah I might want to try hosting like zip files we can keep updated in a SimpleX community we can have one room read only where the latest zip files are uploaded and a sister room linked together where anyone can post. SimpleX is important for vegans so we can support eachother in direct action by affording other activists the cover of what is imo the gold standard of private messaging (post quantum encryption and metadata privacy and no unique user ids) even if we don't take spicy actions ourselves
If you've read my previous post detailing my process of discovering that plastics, paper, cardboard, inks, dyes, glues and ceramics all can contain animal products - not just their excretions, in each of these cases flesh and bones may be used - then you may be remembering an argument vegans sometimes get which is that no one can be 100% vegan. While this is a nirvana fallacy it has got me thinking these last couple months as to what the limit of individual responsibility is.
In the past I have said vegans shouldn't wear leather even if they already bought it because it is commodification and objectification and a strong psychological indicator that leather as a concept is OK on some level.
But if we extend this logic to the keyboard I'm using to type this, what if the plastic contains traces of tallow used in plastic manufacturing, is that disrespectful to the animals that died? OK maybe you could argue it doesn't make much of a different now, "maybe", you say, "the animal flesh content is so low and not even confirmed so the psychological/signalling impact is minimal right" ignoring the fact that turns the victim's deaths into a numbers game, who die to have their tortured bodies desecrated into the very materials that literally surround our entire lives in this death cult society (most of us at least), so yeah ignoring that this argument says "its OK because its only a little bit of dead animal" what about new purchases?
The other week my mouse broke, I use it with my laptop because I find it much more convenient than the track-pad, and playing Mineclonia is basically impossible without it. But, for most use cases I can get by with a keyboard, I use a tiling window manager so most of my computer navigation is done by keyboard anyway. Anyway my point is, how could I justify paying for what is probably dead animal parts in the plastic, inks, and then the cardboard and inks the mouse comes in. So I tried contacting Razer and Steelseries, Razer was more promising but eventually both admitted they could not answer my question and promised to look into it in the future and provide information on their website (I'll believe it when I see it) I've yet to contact Asus, Logitech and probably a bunch of other manufacturers but at the moment its just more effort than its worth I spent weeks going back and forth with Razer to no avail, and what if Asus and Logitech don't know either? I know this is a pessimistic way to think and I should just try contacting them because this is the only way things will get better if we just start by asking.
But thats not all, I recently lost my better hairbrush and haven't even begun looking for a vegan one yet due to lack of motivation, I'm on my last hair bobble and I don't know any vegan options for that either.
I'm sorry this sounds like complaining and it mostly is but my point is basically the anti vegan point but from the other side: it is hard if not impossible to be 100% vegan, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try right? like individually none of these things justify killing an animal if I stood in front of a pig I couldn't say I'm sorry I've got to crush your bones into black ink to print a brochure manual for my new mouse because its slightly more comfortable than my laptop track-pad, while that is true taken in aggregate this is a very difficult moral principle to uphold,
I'm not asking for permission to buy these things and I'm not going to suddenly become an ex vegan, but I'm angry at this society that they put dead animal parts in so much, that they make people unwitting participants in their death cult, what about for example if I go to a restaurant and restaurants have chairs right? and those chairs are either plastic or they may have leather or non vegan wood veneer or wood glue. Eventually these will need replacing. But wait I hear you say, "that's not part of what you're paying for so there is no supply demand relationship there! That's a choice the restaurant makes independently of a vegan customers choices" is it independent though? lets imagine two restaurants one selling vegan options and one owned by a vegan cooperative, the owners have down their best to source as many vegan materials as they can for their vegan decor, they only use vegan cleaning products even their menu leaflets are printed with soy ink on vegan paper, this is all great but now lets say vegans go to the non vegan restaurant thinking they are only responsible for the things they directly pay for: of course the non vegan restaurant is more popular because it caters to a wider group of people, and within a few years the vegan restaurant closes down: now there's one less restaurant in the world actually committed to vegan ideals. So through this story I think we can come to understand that although non vegan components of businesses are not practiced for us they are practiced on out behalf, which makes us culpable, essentially washing the blood from our hands for a practice we know is happening on our behalf but we choose to ignore as not out responsibility.
So where am I going with this tangent about restaurants: well given the prevalence of potentially non vegan materials: items like computer equipment, tyres and shipping/packing materials may also technically be non-vegan, and if we can reasonably assume there's a good chance non vegan computer equipment or tyres were put through use and wore down, then we can surmise that a fraction of any purchase we make goes towards buying new tyres of hard-drives, now if we were making those purchases we would get Michelin tyres https://veganfoundry.com/are-tyres-vegan/ or Seagate hard-drives (contact my simplex for the correspondence screenshots) but since we don't know what decisions these companies are making and 99% of people aren't vegan the odds are good that a fraction of your money went to buying new tyres or hard-drives or whatever else that contains animal flesh.
What about this very site even? Despite the owners themselves presumably being vegan are they even aware that the hard-drives may contain animal products? Does me posting this contribute to the ongoing objectification and commodification of animal victims flesh in the plastic manufacturing industry?
I don't have these answers and I'm feeling totally lost. My only hope is that more vegans will take at least some steps to ameliorate these issues perhaps by contacting companies, I myself will be recontacting the companies that confirmed the vegan status of their products and packaging and asking them if they would include this information on their FAQ pages as soon as I can get the motivation to do that
NB The attached image is the first published book to be certified vegan, so at least I can buy that item with a clear conscience probably haha
A couple of months ago I managed to convince a new friend to go vegan and I was 4y vegan at the time. A couple weeks in they asked me a question out of the blue "hey are pens vegan" and my first thought was well I suppose they could maybe be tested on animals, after all you don't want an ink that would hurt you if you get it on your skin, but what I found was even more disturbing, inks and dyes of many colours can come from various animal sources from crushed insects (cochineal) to bone char in black ink https://veganfoundry.com/is-ink-vegan/ and from weirder sources like snails octopi and cow urine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_dye
Little did I know at the time this would send me down a rabbit hole where I soon learned one by one that papers and cardboard (including toilet paper) use animal flesh as a binding agent https://veganfoundry.com/is-paper-vegan/ https://veganoga.com/is-paper-vegan/ https://www.perfectpapercompany.co.uk/blogs/news/vegan-papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sizing that inks and dyes of all kinds not just pens but printers tattoos ink and hair dyes can contain animal products
So at this point I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, I had this suspicion that due to the relatively niche nature of this information are the vegan certifying orgs even checking product packaging? So I contacted the vegan society by email: " A product's packaging does fall out of the scope of the Vegan Trademark’s standards as there are very few verified options that are widely available. We would however question and potentially reject a registration that goes on to use packaging which is directly sourced from animals." huh? the vegan society probably one of the most outspoken advocates of the rights of vegans is essentially misleading vegans into buying things they think are free from animal products but in reality due to the prevalence of animal based inks papers and glues many vegans may be unwittingly buying animal products that have the Vegan Society stamp of approval, so I tried the vegetarian society: "Our vegetarian and vegan trademark criteria look exclusively at a product’s consumable/usable ingredients and their suitability for vegetarians and vegans. They do not extend to a product’s packaging." then I tried v-label and their response is written out in full in the attached image, if anyone would like the full email transcripts I will post my contact at the end.
Now I'm feeling sad that society has reduced animals lives to worth less than the printing on a box of packaging or literally less than toilet paper we wipe our ass with, I'm feeling angry at the psychopaths that made these manufacturing decisions to save a couple cents on some random box or spaghetti, and I feel betrayed by the vegan society who up until this point I really looked up to as a relentless advocate for animals.
But wait a minute, did I just say glue? Isn't glue in basically everything? If I want to buy a new hairbrush how do I know its using vegan glue? I suppose I could email the companies, so that's what I started doing, to this date I have emailed, phoned or otherwise contacted over 100 companies trying to get to the bottom of animal product use thus far seemingly largely ignored by vegans, because that's the other thing, if you search for posts relating to ie vegan toilet paper or where to find information about vegan packaging there is shockingly little information about this online which is part of why I'm making this post to collate my findings.
So I start emailing these companies one of the first companies I contact is Huel who respond positively they say yes our packaging is vegan we are a 100% vegan product. I continue to contact many companies most of whom either ghost or refuse to investigate saying boilerplate responses like "we don't have the certification/we can't confirm with our supply chain/customer service doesn't have that information" but I do get some early postive responses from Greggs, BarryM, Seagate, Warburtons, Oatly, littlesoapcompany.co.uk, LUSH, Linda McCartney, and to this day that is the exhaustive list of companies that have verbally guaranteed the vegan status of their entire product line's packaging (Please note time of writing is 2024 this information may be outdated if you are reading in later years), other companies were able to provide a guarantee for specific products when they asked me to specify a product.
In one case I escalated to phoning the physical head office of a grocery story company I think it was ALDI (UK) and they advised me to restate my question to customer services but give them an exact product, and I'm like what you expect me to give you a list of your own products when you know I'm asking about everything, 90% of ALDI's products are owned by the company but it turns out their manufacturing is actually contracted to many smaller companies to whom ALDI would have to contact individually to find out about the packaging material. OK fair enough, so I continue to phone ALDI customer service until they eventually say "if it says vegan on the product then the packaging is vegan too" that remains to date my biggest win.
At some point during this process I also learned that plastics contain stearic acid as a slip agent which can be derived from vegetable fats but is instead often derived from "tallow" (flesh) https://veganfoundry.com/is-plastic-vegan/ https://www.pishrochem.com/blog/en/stearic-acid-and-the-plastic-industry/ or as a plasticity agent like this one used in PVC https://bisleyinternational.com/how-is-calcium-stearate-used-in-pvc/ (honestly theres so many plastic additives it wouldn't surprise me if there were more derived from animals)
I would soon learn from correspondence with PZ Cussons and their brand Carex - an ostensibly vegan friendly brand when you look at the sheer number of their soap products certified by the vegan society - that the process of using tallow in plastic packaging production is "common unfortunately, throughout the industry" for a diverse range of plastics PP, PE and MDO.
So I continued getting red-pilled, I learned tyres can be non vegan for the same reason, wallpaper, wood veneer, ceramics (they can use bones https://www.ethicalglobe.com/blog/what-is-vegan-pottery) and then I started bringing it up to online vegan friends and I was surprised to learn that few if any were aware of this, which is why I've taken to borrowing Humane Hancock's term "Vegan Blindspot" (originally in reference to the problem of wild suffering)
My goal's for this post are 3
- Raise awareness to the utterly entrenched nature of animal products in our society (how many times have vegans unwittingly commodified animal flesh by using plastics or glues or paper?)
- Encourage vegans to follow me in contacting customer support teams to demand action so that the notion of non vegan toilet paper etc can be a thing of the past and to that end:
- Begin a conversation about how best to share our findings (perhaps ultimately in pursuit of a community operated database split by world regions), I have contacted doublecheckvegan and plantbasednews with this information and offers to provide my email records neither have replied
I don't use lemmy very often in fact I made this account just to post this but I will check in to the state of this post for a while and if I don't respond here I will create a simplex address you can contact me through (simplex is the most private secure and anonymous open source messenger that I'm aware of better than briar and cwtch and session and matrix)
I will end by posting the only FAQ page I have ever seen confirming the vegan status of a product lines packaging as well as product: https://support.whogivesacrap.org/hc/en-au/articles/11902182808217-Are-your-products-vegan
edit: related cool and good news: the first cardboard packaging company to be officially certified by the vegan society https://www.smurfitkappa.com/uk/products-and-services/packaging/vegan-certified-packaging the first book to be certified by the vegan society ie that the paper adhesives and inks are vegan: https://www.vegansociety.com/news/news/vegan-trademark-registers-book-materials-world-first
edit 2: idea for a preliminary community vegan product status database: member submitted posts on a moderated simplex room containing a list of what they've found to be vegan so far and then an attached zip file for email proof or whatever other proof
edit 3: useful list of items and materials that may not be vegan including items I didn't talk about above: Reference: plastic is not always vegan https://veganfoundry.com/is-plastic-vegan/ ; https://www.pishrochem.com/blog/en/stearic-acid-and-the-plastic-industry/ ; https://bisleyinternational.com/how-is-calcium-stearate-used-in-pvc/ paper is not always vegan https://veganfoundry.com/is-paper-vegan/ inks/dyes are not always vegan https://veganfoundry.com/is-ink-vegan/ ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_dye glues are not always vegan https://bitesizevegan.org/is-glue-made-from-horses-vegan-glue/ Ceramics/Pottery are not always vegan: https://www.oxfordclay.co.uk/blog-1/blog-post-title-one-2ess6 Tyres are not always vegan: https://veganfoundry.com/are-tyres-vegan/ Various arts and crafts tools are not always vegan like pens pencils brushes paints crayons chalk https://chompthis.com/ingredient/?id=773 https://doublecheckvegan.com/vegan-art-supplies/#veganchalk Makeup brushes are not always vegan: https://ethicalelephant.com/vegan-makeup-brushes/ Shaving brushes and razors are not always vegan: https://vegan.com/beauty/shaving/
Household Products
https://doublecheckvegan.com/guide-to-vegan-household-products/
Art Supplies
https://www.artsupplies.co.uk/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-vegan-art-supplies-for-conscious-creatives
Musical Instruments
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I don't know who needs to hear this but if an item at ALDI (UK) says vegetarian or nothing on the packaging check groceries.aldi.co.uk it often says "vegan,vegetarian" under the lifestyle section of the product listing, beats me why they have no issue printing "vegetarian" on products but "vegan" no thats too far even though it would be a more accurate label