Going to be real with you, avoiding plastic in this day and age is like trying to avoid hitting any bugs while you’re driving, and I say that knowing that plastic is technically an animal product. Obviously, I don’t want people to eat a credit card worth of microplastics every day, but it’s impossible to avoid it altogether. It’s used for pretty much every food packaging, furniture, clothes, decor, appliances, cars, and toy on the market. I’m sure you know how hard it is to avoid from personal experience. I try to be as vegan as I can, given the circumstances of the plastic age, but ultimately oil made of ancient dead animals is still preferable to ongoing and unnecessary animal cruelty today.

While I do tend to avoid pleather clothes because most of it sheds in a couple of years or less and is generally too warm for the environment I live in, if my partner or I really need a raincoat for some reason it’ll probably be made of some sort of plastic. We’re indoor nerds that don’t really camp or have physically demanding jobs so that works for us. One of us commutes to the bus, and a simple raincoat gets the job done. I personally use umbrellas and those are made of metal and… yeah, plastic. I guess I could wear big hats more often if I wanted to stop using umbrellas. Most of the time we’ll either layer up or avoid the outdoors altogether… or just get wet lol. It happens sometimes.

If you’ve got the money, there are alternatives to both leather and pleather, although they tend to be on the more expensive and experimental side, such as apple leather, mushroom leather, and cactus leather. There are also vegan wools and cashmere out there, but they can be expensive at full price. If you need vegan work boots you probably will have to save up for them. TBH I don’t think good quality work boots have gotten any cheaper over the years, so you might have to save for new ones regardless. On the bright side, vegan friendly furniture, clothes, and purses have been on the market for a few years and can be purchased second hand if you spend enough time tracking them down. Purchasing second hand is also very helpful for seeing how well a particular vegan material has aged. I have gotten several pairs of goth boots via trading and thrifting this way. Development on these new materials is overall hopeful, but it could still be a few more years before it becomes mainstream. It would certainly be a lot more hopeful if capitalism were toppled, but, well… you could say that about pretty much everything nowadays.