What difference can you make by choosing vegan fashion?
When we choose what we get dressed in, we choose how we engage with the world around us – ecosystems, human and non-human individuals.
More specifically, different materials used to make our clothes have vastly different impacts on our climate, waterways, land, native plants and animals, as well as domesticated animals, and our fellow humans.
Too often this impact is harmful, rather than protective.
If we choose vegan fashion, and more so, total ethics fashion which strives to protect the planet and everyone on it, regardless of species, we can make a positive difference to the fashion industry, helping to shift it away from harmful and exploitative practises.
Choosing vegan leather saves emissions and water
Did you know that according to the Higg Material Sustainability Index, cow skin leather is one of the most environmentally impactful materials to produce, only after alpaca wool and silk?
In fact, even the most common synthetic leather, PU (polyurethane), has far less than half the overall production impact and related harm to the planet.
To make just one pair of cow skin leather boots, at least 66kg of carbon equivalent emissions (CO2e) are released. That’s like charging 8,417 phones.
Comparatively, just 9.5kg of CO2e are released in the production of PU leather boots.
If we look at water, we see a similar story, with synthetic leather products requiring a whopping 14 times less water. A single cow skin leather tote bag is equal to over 17,100L of water – about 537 showers worth.
Of course, there are more sustainable leather alternatives than conventional synthetic leather, too. Piñatex’s pineapple leaf leather alternative has an even smaller production impact, and Desserto ‘cactus leather’ saves 1,864% of CO2e emissions as compared to animal leather, and 77.69% compared to PU. Meanwhile, when cork bark, transformed into ‘cork leather’ is peeled off of living trees without harming them, it helps those trees to sequester more carbon.
Choosing plant-based alternatives to wool protects native land and biodiversity
While wool similarly harms our planet (one light knit sweater made of wool rather than cotton emits 27 times more CO2e), wool production is far less scrutinised by the general public than leather, or synthetic materials like acrylic and polyester (which have a far smaller production impact, though they also shed plastic microfibres).
Untouched native land full of a biodiverse array of plant and animal life is critical to the health of our planet, and of course, the lives of those free-living animals are important and worth protecting.
We need to keep biodiverse land safe, and we can do that by avoiding sheep’s wool, as well as wool from alpacas, and hair from goats labelled as cashmere and mohair.
Why? Well, to produce just one bale of Australian wool rather than Australian cotton (Australia is a major producer of both fibres), 367 times more land must be cleared or kept cleared.
That’s a lot of land that native animals and plants can no longer fully thrive in, for the sake of fashion, when there are better alternatives.
These alternatives include sustainably grown cotton, hemp, as well as cellulosic materials like Tencel and bamboo lyocell, recycled materials, and in the future, even lab-grown ones.
Each bale of wool and cotton represents garments of clothing, and so each of us have a part to play in ensuring we choose land-friendly clothing.
Choosing animal-free clothing can protect all animals – humans and non-humans
Every garment and accessory made from an animal-derived material, whether it’s a leather wallet, a down jacket, a wool scarf or something else, represents suffering.
Every single animal-derived material is produced in a system which slaughters animals – this is true even for wool – and so not only must we consider the environmental footprint of clothes, but the ‘blood footprint’, too.
While there is no perfect material, there certainly are materials which cause far more harm to the planet and to animals than others. Choosing non-animal materials will always be a better choice for the protection of animals.