lurkerlady [she/her]

  • 60 Posts
  • 277 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 28th, 2022

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  • lurkerlady [she/her]
    hexagon
    tocommrequest/c/plasticfree
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    So you can purchase 'mushroom leather' prior to them injecting plastic in it for moccasins, but I actually have no clue how good the material is for that use case in its raw state. Most companies laminate it with plastic to give it better durability, but you'd have to inquire about the raw materials to see if they do this prior to you receiving the sheet.

    https://www.mushroomleathersupply.com/product/mylea

    Here's an example of one you can preorder. Hemp canvas can also be used for shoes, and so can natural rubber (its not made out of plastic, in fact a lot of no plastic options are now using natural rubber)





  • Aha! Found a place!

    https://rawganique.com/collections/organic-socks/products/organic-cotton-socks-elastic-free

    Womens clothing seems to be still too short so not good for tall people, but for plain androgynous 100% cotton socks this should work. Some of these things also have organic elastic (which uses natural rubber, not petro rubber). I'm quite sure the dyes they're using aren't petro dyes but to be 100% certain just go with the natural color. There are lots of amazon stores that advertise theyre 100% cotton but they are blatantly lying you can tell the sock tops contain elastic.




  • lurkerlady [she/her]
    hexagon
    tofashionNo plastic vegan shoe research musings
    ·
    edit-2
    13 days ago

    In general with all of these products, you can see companies using weasel words

    • They say things like '100% mushroom leather'. Usually, they say if something is polyurethane or not and any of the composite materials. If they don't mention all the constituent parts (e.g. glue, rubber, etc) they are being very suspicious.

    • Some sites are honest about it. Look at this mushroom shoe here. It says "Upper: 60% Fungus | 40% glass and recycled PET manmade leather". PET is plastic.

    • One of the producers of mushroom leather claims that its 100% vegetable. However, they also recommend post market laminating, which means infusing it with plastic. But because you can order it yourself allegedly pure, you could send it to a cobbler to make you a shoe from it without plastic, assuming their claims are correct.

    Fundamentally, these alternative leathers do reduce the carbon output of the products, however, if your concerns are reducing microplastics (particularly from soft materials undergoing friction! those get in your lungs easily) in your home and so on, then thats not gonna work. I will say that the mushroom leather and cactus leather ones seem to be the least bullshit ones from that list. From what I can tell, people generally also feel like mushroom leather can tear and have issues with it somewhat easily, its probably not the best choice for footwear, but it might be good for other applications.

    Desserto (cactus leather) and Mirum (rubber leather) have companies that explain exactly how their process works and what exactly the material is made of, so while many people selling these products are lying, the actual producers aren't. The most notable thing about mirum is that it doesn't seem to require any significant post market laminating, and is very durable. So everything there is crazy expensive but you might actually be getting what you pay for.

    Here's an example of another website that lists each constituent product each thing is made of. It does a lot of fluff about how great and sustainable they are then they list PET and PU lmfao. Pinetex is transparently PU on their site btw. In general for purses and so on it would be best to look for canvas offerings.

    This site claims to be 100% plastic free for their purses and so on which is a hard claim and not jerking people around at least. But you gotta be willing to buy a purse for 150-300 dollars. If they made shoes for 150 that would actually be reasonable for a custom shoe.





  • maybe its something i should self crit on for going for that insult, but some guy with a napoleon complex was trying to fight/neg me out of nowhere, a woman who is more fit than him and could take him in a fight... idk. it just pissed me off and it made me wonder who else he harasses if he had the gall to start shit with a woman a foot taller than him. i wanted to inflict maximum damage to his ego that makes him think he can fuck with women. i deeply enjoyed shoving him onto that disgusting gas station floor. i probably wouldnt have gone for an insult like that if it wasnt a situation that was turning physical by him blocking the entrance, that really set me off.







  • These are very cute and give off fun Scandinavian peasant vibes but unfortunately they dont have tall sizing options it seems, particularly for sleeves thonk They do have measurements on their site I'll look and see what my friend needs. 120 bucks for a shirt is certainly a kitty-cri-screm moment, you can order a lot of these things custom instead of buying their cookie cutter sizes at this price.