Comment on is it really worth it

• TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Listen, okay, over 90% of your oh-so-“natural” hedgehog-based pencils are dyed with carcinogenic chromium and act as an environmental contaminant when thrown away. At worst, it’s a lateral change to use plastic.

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  • Brahvim@lemmy.kde.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I actually had no idea these were a different kind of pencil! The kind I’ve always used are ordinary wooden ones that… well, some people chew up, the graphite in which uses clay, shavings of which are usually fine-ish (maybe not?!) to dispose off anywhere and… some startup, years ago, tried putting plant saplings in.

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    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Sorry, I didn’t mean to spread misinformation. Nothing in the OP is dangerous (that I know of). I thought we were doing a shitpost-y rehash of the cow-based versus plant-based leather argument you see online sometimes.

      Specifically, plant-based leather normally is plastic, but then over 90% of cow-based leather is chromium-tanned so it doesn’t naturally decompose (cross-links the collagen fibers), and in a recent study, 82% of cow-based leather products sampled from southeastern China contained more than the EU regulatory limit for CrVI.

      The argument being that, between that poor disposibility of the overwhelming majority of leather and the relatively enormous amount of resources that go into making cow leather (raising the cow, slaughterhouse, tannery (esp. toxic runoff for the latter)), citing the environment as a justification to dunk on vegans for using plastic-based leather reflects a narrow understanding of cow leather’s impact on the environment.

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