I see a lot of people at least joking about going vegan lately. I’ve been vegan for roughly… ah, I want to say 4 years now? I lost track awhile ago. It was around the time the wreckers came to Hexbear and convinced a bunch of us to watch Dominion (highly recommend doing so btw, it’s free online).

ANYWAYS, if you’re interested in more than just shitposts and are seriously interested in veganism I was thinking I could help answer any questions you have. Comment here or send me a DM if you’re blush shy. shy This comm has limits on what we can talk about btw, such as diet. And I think the whole website has restrictions on recommending specific brands of food? So DM for questions like that, thanks.

  • PurrLure [she/her]OP
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    81 month ago

    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.

    • Jabril [none/use name]
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      71 month ago

      Thanks for the honest answer. Yeah it’s very difficult. I’ve managed to cut out a lot of plastics and want to prioritize it due to the long term health risks, but there is no way to do it completely. I figure clothes and other textiles are probably the most common plastic we come into contact with daily, and they are designed in a way that sheds and gets everywhere. I watched a video recently of a guy putting a new goretex rain jacket under a showerhead and then testing the water that collected at the bottom. The PFAS were incredibly high. If you can stop having plastic constantly on your body all day every day, it surely goes a long way to limiting ingestion. Luckily I mostly can achieve that with cotton and linen, just the winter/rainy clothes which are the hardest.

      • bubbalu [they/them]
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        61 month ago

        The biologically active dose of PFAS is in the parts per trillion range. Virtually 0 PFAS is still too much. Meaning half a PICOgram is detectable in a droplet of water.

        • Jabril [none/use name]
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          21 month ago

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ht7nOaIkpI

          This guy ran distilled water in a closed system for 24 hours and tested it with 0 PFAS, put an arcteryx jacket and ran it for another 24 hours. The results were PFOA: .65 ppt PFBA: 21 ppt

          He also tested his blood which was around 1000 ppt of PFOA, and apparently that is below the national average of around 4000 ppt.

          Pretty terrible situation, but I guess all we can do is try to limit it in the ways that we have control over. I wonder if the effort it takes to do this is truly worth it, but there’s literally no way to know so I’ll take my chances trying to avoid it as best as possible.

          • bubbalu [they/them]
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            11 month ago

            The 10 States Standards states are working to include PFAS rules. The issue is that most current treatment stacks do not remove PFAS/PFOA effectively. It’s mostly a point of discharge and industrial use restriction problem which the US does not do well already—nevermind the hamstringing coming down currently. EPA was moving to make PFAS/PFOA rules which have been walked back by Trump.