Guilty secret about vegan fashion
Plastic fibres that pollute our oceans. Factories using toxic chemicals. Clothes that never decompose.
HEAD along the High Street and it’s hard to miss the biggest trend of the year. From vegan ice cream and cheeses in Lidl to McDonald’s meat-free Happy Meals, veganism has gone mainstream. But it’s not just confined to what we eat. According to the Vegan Society of Ireland, veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals — not just for food but for clothing and any other purpose as well.
Tapping into that market, last month Marks & Spencer announced it was launching a range of vegan shoes featuring 350 styles for men, women and children. Billed as ‘guilt-free’ purchases, they include everything from tasselled loafers to stilettos.
And the company is far from alone
in responding to the growing demand for animal-friendly fashion.
Fashion giant ASOS has banned suppliers from using animal-derived materials, including mohair, silk and fur. The first ever Vegan Fashion Week in Los Angeles has just taken place to huge acclaim — and even Meghan Markle has spoken of her penchant for vegan ‘leather’ trousers.
All well and good in theory, but how ‘guilt free’ are the vegan materials being used in place of traditional, animalsourced ones?
Take fake fur, for example. There are calls for it to be relaelled ‘plastic fur’ to make consumers aware of what they are buying.
Made from fossil fuels, not only will fake fur never biodegrade, but it is made of polyester, a plastic-based fabric also commonly used to make fleeces.
Washing the material loosens plastic microfibres, which end up in the world’s oceans.
The tiny fibres — thinner than a human hair — are then eaten by plankton and shellfish and can ultimately be consumed by humans.
And what about those vegan shoes? Sure, they may contain no leather, but a spokesperson for M&S reveals they are made from a mixture of ‘synthetic materials’ including polyurethane and polyester. In other words, more plastic.
The company says ‘all M&S shoes are designed to last’ and points out that its vegan range contains a ‘proportion’ of recycled materials.
The company added: ‘We encourage our customers to give their footwear a second life through our recycling scheme, Shwopping, which has seen us recycle 30 million items to date.’
There are similar issues with materials used to replace wool. Most of the mainstream replacements are plastic-based, such as acrylic and polyester.
As for silk — a no-go fabric for vegans because it involves killing silk worms — the cocktail of chemicals used to manufacture rayon, a common alternative, is so toxic it has been blamed for poisoning workers and wiping out waterways globally.
ALL of which is why some experts are warning consumers not to assume they are saving the planet simply by buying a vegan item of clothing.
‘While vegan shoes, clothing and fabrics sound great we mustn’t confuse vegan with always being environmentally friendly or even people-friendly,’ says Rachelle Strauss, an environmental campaigner and founder of the annual awareness campaign Zero Waste Week.
‘The danger comes if “vegan” is used as a way to sell more fast, cheap fashion. If that happens then there will be a cost further down the line, whether it’s cheap labour or the use of cheap plastics that are likely, at some point in the manufacturing process, to use toxic chemicals.
‘The way these items are made, and what they are made from, is crucial. If it’s wrong to kill animals for leather, then we have to look at the wider picture.
‘Isn’t it also wrong to kill fish, birds and other creatures with the pollution caused in the manufacture of these synthetic materials, and the fact that once worn and discarded they will never biodegrade?’
Around 225,000 tonnes of used clothing goes to landfill in Ireland every year — a figure that has risen 40 per cent in the past ten years — with a large proportion of it made from plastic-based fabrics.
The scourge of plastic pollution prompted the Daily Mail’s Turn the Tide on Plastic campaign, which has been instrumental in dramatically cutting the use of plastic shopping bags.
PROPONENTS of vegan alternatives insist that while some of these materials may have shortcomings, they are ‘less bad’ than animal-derived items.
‘There are consequences to all actions that can cause harm to the environment or to animals,’ says Dominika Piasecka, spokesperson for The Vegan Society.
‘However, we are trying to minimise the harm to both and choosing to buy vegan things often results in the least harm caused. We acknowledge that there will be some environmental consequences of buying things like plastic but we encourage people in their purchases to go for the least harmful option.’
So are fur and leather really worse for the environment?
The Sustainable Apparel Coalition — a global collective of environmentally minded fashion brands — uses a measure called the Higg Materials Sustainability Index. It scores textiles based on the amounts of energy, water and chemicals that go into their production, and the pollution and greenhouse gases that result. A higher score, means the material is worse for the environment.
According to the index, cow leather, for example, is worse than synthetic polyurethane leather, since it scores 161 versus 59. This is because leather comes from an animal which requires large amounts of energy to produce the feed it eats, while emitting climate-warming methane gases and polluting effluents.
By contrast, petroleum-based products such as polyester, acrylic, nylon and polyurethane fare much better.
However, critics say the index doesn’t consider how consumers use clothes, or what happens to them when they are discarded. A woollen coat, for example, is likely to be worn for longer than a synthetic one and, during its lifetime, will not leach plastic microfibres into the ocean.
The hope is that future materials will solve these problems. Already, innovations are seeing ‘leathers’ made from pineapple leaves and mushrooms, and artificial silk grown in the laboratory.
Here, Tom Rawstorne investigates how green vegan materials really are ...
PRETTY WOMAN’S DAMNING LEGACY
VEGANS don’t wear leather because it comes from animals, primarily cows. While leather is often a by-product of the meat industry, it’s argued that buying it financially supports factory farms and abattoirs — and the cruelty that campaigning groups such as The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) say this involves.
Cattle farming is also seen as one of the most polluting forms of agriculture, and the process of turning skins into leather involves large amounts of energy and a toxic brew of chemicals.
Vegan leather is often made by combining a fabric backing with a plastic coating. The plastic used is either polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or polyurethane (PU).
PVC — think Julia Roberts’ shiny black thigh-high boots in Pretty Woman — is described by Greenpeace as the ‘single most environmentally damaging type of plastic’, contaminating humans and the environment throughout its life cycle.
Fortunately, it is becoming less common with polyurethane now more widely used. While less toxic to produce, this is still an oil-based, plastic product and its production can result in the emission of dangerous gases. It is less likely to last as long as leather, and once thrown away will not biodegrade.
Retail manufacturers who use it say that they are trying to provide sustainable alternatives.
The manufacturer of the bag featured on our cover said: ‘I do my best to create designs that are ethically made and sustainable. I’ve used one of our bags for two years.
‘It is important to give people who are vegan, or who have
decided to avoid animal products, an option. I hope my products never end up in a landfill.’
One alternative to polyurethane leather is Piñatex, a leather-like textile woven from the long fibres in the discarded leaves of the pineapple plant.
Since its commercial launch in 2015, Piñatex has been used by about 500 manufacturers, including for vegan sneakers sold by Hugo Boss. According to its website it is 100 per cent biodegradable — other than the petroleum-based resins currently used for its coatings.
MICROFIBRES THAT POLLUTE OCEANS
JUST because sheep aren’t killed in the production of wool does not make the yarn vegan. This is because the animals are, vegan campaigners say, ‘exploited’ in an allegedly ‘abusive’ process, as they sometimes have their tails cut off and may be castrated or mishandled during shearing. Once their wool production declines, they will be sent to slaughter.
Popular materials used to make fabrics instead of wool include cotton, polyester and acrylic.
The term ‘polyester’ describes a type of polymer derived from petroleum, while acrylic is a similar synthetic material.
While polyester has a lesser environmental impact during production, unlike wool it does not biodegrade.
Since 1990, consumption of polyester has grown at a rate of nearly 7 per cent per year globally, and it now represents half of the total market in man-made and natural fibres. When clothes made from it are washed, plastic microfibres are released, polluting rivers and oceans and contaminating the food-chain.
Cotton production is also damaging to the environment, using huge quantities of pesticides and water. Greener alternatives include organic cotton and Tencel, made from trees grown in sustainably managed forests.
FAUX FUR OFTEN ENDS UP IN LANDFILL
FOR obvious reasons vegans won’t wear fur, claiming the industry is cruel and exploits animals to profit from their skins. It is also damaging to the environment. Raising animals for their pelts is energy intensive, and their waste potentially polluting.
Turning the skins into wearable garments involves yet more energy as well as a cocktail of toxic chemicals, including formaldehyde and chromium. These can leach into the environment and pose serious health risks to workers in fur-processing plants.
The most common alternative to fur is faux fur. Although its production has a lesser environmental impact than the real thing, it is a plastic and will not biodegrade.
Also, because it has been historically cheaper than real fur it is used by fast-fashion outlets, enabling consumers to afford multiple garments made from it.
As a result, there is little secondhand market for faux fur, meaning it often ends up in landfill.
‘The use of real fur is, of course, deplorable, but faux fur is not the answer,’ says Orsola de Castro of Fashion Revolution, a campaign for ethics in the fashion industry.
‘If you decide to switch to an alternative, you should ensure that alternative is just as friendly to all life — and we know plastic isn’t.’
Efforts to make faux fur more eco-friendly include the creation of a product made entirely from recycled plastic bottles.
TOXIC GLOOP OF CHEMICALS
SILK is a fibre that silkworms and other insects weave to make their webs and cocoons — outer casings that protect them during the pupal stage. But, according to PETA, most of the insects used by the silk industry don’t live past this stage — ‘because they are boiled or gassed alive inside their cocoons, which causes the cocoons to begin unravelling so that workers can obtain the silk threads’.
For every kilogram of silk, some 6,600 silkworms are killed.
The industry is not eco-friendly either. After cow leather, silk is the second worst performer on the Higg Materials Sustainability Index. Producing even a small amount of silk is highly labour intensive and the process uses large amounts of chemicals.
Instead vegans are recommended to switch to ‘humane alternatives’, including nylon, polyester, and rayon. As global silk consumption has fallen, that of rayon has risen.
But, warns journalist Alden Wicker, an expert on sustainable fashion, just because rayon is made of plant materials does not make it eco-friendly.
‘To make rayon, you have to harvest a large number of trees or bamboo, shred and churn them into tiny pieces, dissolve the wood bits in a soup of carbon disulfide, then send these vats of viscous gloop to a factory to be spun into semi-synthetic fibres,’ she says.
‘Workers exposed to the fumes emitted during this process can suffer a range of health problems.’
Another, greener, alternative is soysilk, made from waste soy residue from the processing of soybeans for food products such as tofu — allowing vegans to both eat and wear their favourite food.
A synthetic, laboratory-grown spider silk is also being developed by a Californian company and has been showcased in a number of designs by Stella McCartney.
PILLOWS THAT NEVER BIODEGRADE
GOOSE and duck down — the soft layer of feathers closest to a bird’s skin — are used in the linings of winter garments and in other household products, such as duvets and pillows.
The down may be a by-product of the meat industry, with the environmental problems related to that, or obtained by live plucking — removed from the birds when they are still alive. While reputable manufacturers avoid feathers produced in this way, the majority of down is produced in China, which makes it difficult to trace where it comes from.
A popular vegan alternative is polyester filling, which is plasticbased and won’t biodegrade.
A greener alternative is kapok, which comes from the kapok tree that produces seeds protected by a soft wool-like fibre. Due to the fact it is buoyant and water-resistant, this fibre was previously used in life-jackets — and is now being used to fill pillows and in place of down in other garments.