Living as a vegan can be challenging, especially when it comes to the materials that you can and can’t use. It’s often tricky to figure out what materials are in line with your ethics, and if you’re shopping for clothes, you may be wondering if viscose is vegan.
Viscose is a vegan fabric, as it is 100 percent free from animal products. A lot of vegans opt to wear viscose for this reason. It’s lightweight, absorbent, soft, resilient, and wears well, making it a great clothing choice. However, there are no perfect fabrics, and the manufacturing process of viscose does have some drawbacks.
In this article, we’ll look more deeply at whether viscose is suitable for vegans, and its main pros and cons. We’ll also look briefly at how environmentally friendly this fabric is.
Is Viscose Suitable For Vegans?
Viscose is vegan because it contains no animal fibers at all, and it is entirely derived from plant matter. That means you can purchase and wear it without contributing at all to animal cruelty or the animal farming industries. There is no point at which viscose needs to be treated with animal products to produce it.
Most people associate viscose with clothes because this is where it is most commonly seen, but it appears in other places too. You might see viscose in things like cellophane, carpets, and occasionally even in sausage casings. Regardless of where you see it, viscose itself should be suitable for vegans (although the rest of the product may not be).
Viscose is a popular material for clothing for a number of reasons. It has an attractive appearance, rather like silk – but without the ethical concerns that silk immediately brings to mind. It can be used to make a range of fabrics, including synthetic velvet. It has numerous advantages, including:
- It wears well
- It washes well
- It retains its color
- It’s soft and comfortable
- It’s lightweight
- It’s absorbent
It’s also generally cheaper than silk, and it feels smooth like cotton – so it’s a nice option in many ways.
How Do They Make Viscose?
Viscose is made by taking cellulose from trees (usually fast-growing types such as eucalyptus, pine, and beech, or plants like sugar cane or bamboo). At its core, it’s therefore a natural product, although it does need to be dipped in chemicals to break down the fibers and make them malleable enough to be useful.
Viscose has existed for more than 100 years, although it is often called rayon instead, and the early versions of viscose were too flammable to be safe to wear. The fabric became popular around 1905 when commercial viscose fabrics hit the market.
Some people class viscose and rayon as natural fabrics because they are made from trees and plant matter, but it’s a little more complicated than this definition would imply. Viscose doesn’t fall into either the natural fabrics (bamboo, cotton, wool, etc.) or the synthetic fabrics (spandex, polyester, acrylic, etc.), but instead lands somewhere in between.
Is Viscose Environmentally Friendly?
For many vegans, the environmental impact of a fabric is almost as important as whether any animal products are contained within it. Unfortunately, viscose does have some problems from an environmental perspective.
Firstly, the chemicals that are used to break down the viscose fibers are not environmentally friendly. The fibers have to be subjected to both acid and bleach, and the cellulose in the plant matter has to be modified to make it respond to water. Chemicals like carbon disulfide are frequently involved, and can affect the workers as well as the local environment.
The manufacturing process involves a lot of chemicals and is considered pretty polluting, to both people and the planet.
It’s also quite wasteful, as only around 30 percent of the tree can be used. With major concerns about deforestation, this means that a lot of viscose should be considered unsustainable (although some of it comes from FSC or PEFC-certified forests).
Additionally, because viscose is quite cheap, it tends to be part of the fast fashion industry. The clothes are often poorly made, throw-away pieces that cost very little to buy, and soon wear out. They then end up in landfills, and more virgin materials have to be harvested to make more clothing to replace them.
Overall, therefore, viscose isn’t an ideal material for vegans to use – even though it is technically a vegan fabric. If you are going to choose viscose clothing (or other fabrics), look for certified sustainable fabric, and choose items that are high-quality so they will last well.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are some complexities associated with viscose fabric. It is vegan, in that it is made from plant matter and no animal products are used in the manufacturing process – but its environmental concerns make it a borderline product for many eco-friendly vegans. Overall, other more natural fabrics may be a better choice.
