Why we made vegan surf zinc

You heard right, friends: Australia’s first vegan surf zinc is here!

Unless you’re vegan, you might never have considered the beeswax industry, why sustainable beekeeping matters or whether your zinc is made using animal products. 

We covered the ins and outs of the beekeeping industry in a blog a while back, but essentially it goes a little like this:

• Bees, while small, are an insanely important keystone species. These busy little guys help pollinate about 80 per cent of flowering plants, plus a third of the food we eat. All of this pollinating positively affects not just humans but the whole ecosystem.
• Global bee populations are declining, and this seems to be partly caused by insecticides that bees come into contact with via the crops that they pollinate (which then also contaminates bee products).
• Most commercially produced bee products are not created sustainably. For one, producers often use artificial, petroleum-based combs rather than real honeycomb (petroleum is a nightmare for the environment). They also harvest a large amount of honey from the hives and replace it with sugar water or corn syrup, which disrupts the natural balance of the honey and exposes bees to disease (another key player in the dissemination of bee populations). Animal rights groups also object to the practices of clipping the wings of queen bees and the culling of bee colonies that often occur in commercial beekeeping.

From the beginning, our mission has been to not only to tread very lightly on the earth, but also to actively create alternative eco-friendly products that make the planet more sustainable. So while sourcing local sustainable beeswax was a possibility when we were hand-making zincs in our home kitchen, it proved a little tricky when demand grew and we needed to start slinging more and more tins of the good stuff.

After much researching and soul-searching, we decided to stop using beeswax altogether because we didn’t feel comfortable with the practices of any large-scale beekeeping producers. Hence, Australia’s first vegan surf zinc was born! Huzzah! 

We now make our zinc with natural butters, waxes, oils and non-nano particle zinc oxide. It glides on easy and is designed to be applied super thick and protect you for up to four hours in the water. Like all our products, it’s cruelty-free, palm oil free, reef safe, great for sensitive skin and SPF50 TGA listed. Plus, it comes in a nice big 70-gram tin and has a scrum-diddly-umptious cacao aroma. 

So, that’s the long and short of why we created our vegan surf zinc. Any questions? We’re all ears.