A couple of months ago I managed to convince a new friend to go vegan and I was 4y vegan at the time. A couple weeks in they asked me a question out of the blue “hey are pens vegan” and my first thought was well I suppose they could maybe be tested on animals, after all you don’t want an ink that would hurt you if you get it on your skin, but what I found was even more disturbing, inks and dyes of many colours can come from various animal sources from crushed insects (cochineal) to bone char in black ink https://veganfoundry.com/is-ink-vegan/ and from weirder sources like snails octopi and cow urine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_dye
Little did I know at the time this would send me down a rabbit hole where I soon learned one by one that papers and cardboard (including toilet paper) use animal flesh as a binding agent https://veganfoundry.com/is-paper-vegan/ https://veganoga.com/is-paper-vegan/ https://www.perfectpapercompany.co.uk/blogs/news/vegan-papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sizing that inks and dyes of all kinds not just pens but printers tattoos ink and hair dyes can contain animal products
So at this point I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, I had this suspicion that due to the relatively niche nature of this information are the vegan certifying orgs even checking product packaging? So I contacted the vegan society by email: " A product’s packaging does fall out of the scope of the Vegan Trademark’s standards as there are very few verified options that are widely available. We would however question and potentially reject a registration that goes on to use packaging which is directly sourced from animals." huh? the vegan society probably one of the most outspoken advocates of the rights of vegans is essentially misleading vegans into buying things they think are free from animal products but in reality due to the prevalence of animal based inks papers and glues many vegans may be unwittingly buying animal products that have the Vegan Society stamp of approval, so I tried the vegetarian society: “Our vegetarian and vegan trademark criteria look exclusively at a product’s consumable/usable ingredients and their suitability for vegetarians and vegans. They do not extend to a product’s packaging.” then I tried v-label and their response is written out in full in the attached image, if anyone would like the full email transcripts I will post my contact at the end.
Now I’m feeling sad that society has reduced animals lives to worth less than the printing on a box of packaging or literally less than toilet paper we wipe our ass with, I’m feeling angry at the psychopaths that made these manufacturing decisions to save a couple cents on some random box or spaghetti, and I feel betrayed by the vegan society who up until this point I really looked up to as a relentless advocate for animals.
But wait a minute, did I just say glue? Isn’t glue in basically everything? If I want to buy a new hairbrush how do I know its using vegan glue? I suppose I could email the companies, so that’s what I started doing, to this date I have emailed, phoned or otherwise contacted over 100 companies trying to get to the bottom of animal product use thus far seemingly largely ignored by vegans, because that’s the other thing, if you search for posts relating to ie vegan toilet paper or where to find information about vegan packaging there is shockingly little information about this online which is part of why I’m making this post to collate my findings.
So I start emailing these companies one of the first companies I contact is Huel who respond positively they say yes our packaging is vegan we are a 100% vegan product. I continue to contact many companies most of whom either ghost or refuse to investigate saying boilerplate responses like “we don’t have the certification/we can’t confirm with our supply chain/customer service doesn’t have that information” but I do get some early postive responses from Greggs, BarryM, Seagate, Warburtons, Oatly, littlesoapcompany.co.uk, LUSH, Linda McCartney, and to this day that is the exhaustive list of companies that have verbally guaranteed the vegan status of their entire product line’s packaging (Please note time of writing is 2024 this information may be outdated if you are reading in later years), other companies were able to provide a guarantee for specific products when they asked me to specify a product.
In one case I escalated to phoning the physical head office of a grocery story company I think it was ALDI (UK) and they advised me to restate my question to customer services but give them an exact product, and I’m like what you expect me to give you a list of your own products when you know I’m asking about everything, 90% of ALDI’s products are owned by the company but it turns out their manufacturing is actually contracted to many smaller companies to whom ALDI would have to contact individually to find out about the packaging material. OK fair enough, so I continue to phone ALDI customer service until they eventually say “if it says vegan on the product then the packaging is vegan too” that remains to date my biggest win.
At some point during this process I also learned that plastics contain stearic acid as a slip agent which can be derived from vegetable fats but is instead often derived from “tallow” (flesh) https://veganfoundry.com/is-plastic-vegan/ https://www.pishrochem.com/blog/en/stearic-acid-and-the-plastic-industry/ or as a plasticity agent like this one used in PVC https://bisleyinternational.com/how-is-calcium-stearate-used-in-pvc/ (honestly theres so many plastic additives it wouldn’t surprise me if there were more derived from animals)
I would soon learn from correspondence with PZ Cussons and their brand Carex - an ostensibly vegan friendly brand when you look at the sheer number of their soap products certified by the vegan society - that the process of using tallow in plastic packaging production is “common unfortunately, throughout the industry” for a diverse range of plastics PP, PE and MDO.
So I continued getting red-pilled, I learned tyres can be non vegan for the same reason, wallpaper, wood veneer, ceramics (they can use bones https://www.ethicalglobe.com/blog/what-is-vegan-pottery) and then I started bringing it up to online vegan friends and I was surprised to learn that few if any were aware of this, which is why I’ve taken to borrowing Humane Hancock’s term “Vegan Blindspot” (originally in reference to the problem of wild suffering)
My goal’s for this post are 3
- Raise awareness to the utterly entrenched nature of animal products in our society (how many times have vegans unwittingly commodified animal flesh by using plastics or glues or paper?)
- Encourage vegans to follow me in contacting customer support teams to demand action so that the notion of non vegan toilet paper etc can be a thing of the past and to that end:
- Begin a conversation about how best to share our findings (perhaps ultimately in pursuit of a community operated database split by world regions), I have contacted doublecheckvegan and plantbasednews with this information and offers to provide my email records neither have replied
I don’t use lemmy very often in fact I made this account just to post this but I will check in to the state of this post for a while and if I don’t respond here I will create a simplex address you can contact me through (simplex is the most private secure and anonymous open source messenger that I’m aware of better than briar and cwtch and session and matrix)
I will end by posting the only FAQ page I have ever seen confirming the vegan status of a product lines packaging as well as product: https://support.whogivesacrap.org/hc/en-au/articles/11902182808217-Are-your-products-vegan
edit: related cool and good news: the first cardboard packaging company to be officially certified by the vegan society https://www.smurfitkappa.com/uk/products-and-services/packaging/vegan-certified-packaging the first book to be certified by the vegan society ie that the paper adhesives and inks are vegan: https://www.vegansociety.com/news/news/vegan-trademark-registers-book-materials-world-first
edit 2: idea for a preliminary community vegan product status database: member submitted posts on a moderated simplex room containing a list of what they’ve found to be vegan so far and then an attached zip file for email proof or whatever other proof
edit 3: useful list of items and materials that may not be vegan including items I didn’t talk about above: Reference: plastic is not always vegan https://veganfoundry.com/is-plastic-vegan/ ; https://www.pishrochem.com/blog/en/stearic-acid-and-the-plastic-industry/ ; https://bisleyinternational.com/how-is-calcium-stearate-used-in-pvc/ paper is not always vegan https://veganfoundry.com/is-paper-vegan/ inks/dyes are not always vegan https://veganfoundry.com/is-ink-vegan/ ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_dye glues are not always vegan https://bitesizevegan.org/is-glue-made-from-horses-vegan-glue/ Ceramics/Pottery are not always vegan: https://www.oxfordclay.co.uk/blog-1/blog-post-title-one-2ess6 Tyres are not always vegan: https://veganfoundry.com/are-tyres-vegan/ Various arts and crafts tools are not always vegan like pens pencils brushes paints crayons chalk https://chompthis.com/ingredient/?id=773 https://doublecheckvegan.com/vegan-art-supplies/#veganchalk Makeup brushes are not always vegan: https://ethicalelephant.com/vegan-makeup-brushes/ Shaving brushes and razors are not always vegan: https://vegan.com/beauty/shaving/
Household Products
https://doublecheckvegan.com/guide-to-vegan-household-products/
Art Supplies
https://www.artsupplies.co.uk/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-vegan-art-supplies-for-conscious-creatives
Musical Instruments
There’s a lot to take in here and a lot of useful information and resources. Thank you for taking the time not just to contact these companies but also the effort in sharing that information here. It is much appreciated.
Huel is an interesting one. Full disclosure it’s been several years since I was buying their products but at the time the packaging and shipping materials seemed pretty “standard” to me. It could be that the alternatives are unassuming to the untrained eye and I missed it. Or- maybe they don’t know as much about their supplies as they say, or maybe they’re an outlier that has actually researched all this independently. It’s also possible their methods have changed significantly since I was buying it.
It’s so hard to know what can be trusted unless it comes from your own household that I’ve given up on most outside sources.
So in the case of vegetable inks they look exactly the same I think, and stearic acid for plastiic you can get the exact same molecule from vegetable fats so the plastic will literally be exactly the same