Old followers will remember when one of my short vent post about hating the euphemistic way textiles that are essentially plastic are marketed and described, which included amongst others 'vegan leather', broke containment. And since then I have seen a lot of posts on tumblr by vegans dismissing people who have made such posts, stating that people only pretend to care about plastic pollution and its environmental impacts to shit on vegans. And I'm sure this criticism is fair for a lot of people who reblog the posts (I live in the world, I have to face how much people.... seemingly do not care), but why do they think that is the case for the OPs? Why would they be that pissed off if they didn't care about reducing plastic pollution in the first place???
My own post was the culmination of the fact that I had been redefining my relationship to plastic and waste more generally for years, and faced extreme frustration realising how inescapable plastic can be, how many names it can be found under, and how much switching to plastic has affected the quality and longevity of objects that have long been part of human life. As part of that process, I had decided to start learning how to mend my clothes with my late grandmother's sewing stash, which then led to me learning how to sew in an effort to recycle old clothes knowing they would otherwise end up in the landfill even if they were brought to a charity shop. Being self-taught, I had turned to youtube tutorials and videos by sewists.... but even then plastic was everywhere under these euphemism. Genuinely the thing that broke the camel's back wrt to that post was hearing 'synthetic whale bone' too many time while I was in a bad mood, where I ended up bitchily saying out loud 'fucking just plastic jesus christ'. After that I just listed other examples as part of the vent I thought would stay on this blog. I do hate the term 'vegan leather' but that has to do with the marketing aspect and the sort of 'green-washing' it implies, not its ties to people who are vegan. Honestly in comparison I dislike faux-fur more, because it looks like it was brought into existence for the sole purpose of shedding plastic everywhere.
