Framing it as "vegan" feels misleading and confusing. Just call it "synthetic". There are leather hiking boots and synthetic hiking boots. Leave the bloody vegans out of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_fiber
If you care that cows only express milk after birth and thus the industry is a combination of forced pregnancy and infanticide (most calves aren't economical), that's a long-winded way of saying "milk is immoral", and people quite often go from "$thing is immoral" to "I will not purchase $thing".
* Or at least, can be non-vegan: there's bacterial sources of casein but I don't know how economically relevant that is.
I thought it was a good description actually?
I wonder if using the word "vegan" will harm them in the long run from people who take pride in avoiding "woke" vegan things. A cursory glance at the right-wing tabloids in the UK will I think demonstrate that this is a real concern.
I hope rationality wins in this regard. But it seems to be a growing battle.
Vegan just means trying to avoid / reduce harm to animals / environment where practically possible. It's pragmatic not dogmatic.
I find more problematic they call "leather" to something that is not leather at all.
I personally hate that the plastics industry has managed to greenwash and convince people of it being a "healthier better option" because of the Vegan label, while slowly suffocating and killing us all.
The fact that Vegans (the Vegan community?) are fine with being co-opted with mass pollution, destruction of the environment, and sterilisation of the animal kingdom shows me how shallow their opinions are.
Just look at the other comments here. We should be pushing for more sustainable solutions, not just any old thing just because it's not leather.
While technically true, that has nothing at all to do with veganism. Even as someone with little interest in veganism I can see that.
It seems you are expecting vegans to manifest a fully integrated no-cruelty world instantly or they are all hypocrites.
I don't expect the Vegan society to "manifest" anything. Only to advocate towards a better world, and I do not see how greenwashing plastics will fulfil that as ultimately I see plastics as detrimental towards life.
Plastics are, generally, _absolutely_ a cleaner option than leather. Leather tanning is a horrendously dirty industrial process, and particularly difficult to make clean. I mention it in another comment, but it's one of these industrial processes which is being wholesale evicted from the developed world, and may start to have serious issues in China too as China gets more serious on air and water pollution.
Coal and natural gas are almost purely fossilized plants.
At some point, people picked up the simplified thinking that fossil fuel = dinosaurs, but the carbon-rich deposits are primarily from the Carboniferous period, at which point animal life was mostly invertebrates, fish and small tetrapods.