There's also a related issue with the green people here
www.greenpeople.co.uk/Greenpeople_buav.htmBUAV - Misinformation on animal testing
The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection campaign for the end of animal testing, an aim which Green People fully support.
However, it has come to Green People's attention that the BUAV are falsely claiming that Green People "claim not to conduct/commission animal tests, but do not operate a fixed cut off date policy". They further imply that Green People use ingredients that may have been animal tested by someone else.
This is absolutely untrue.
Green People do work to a fixed cut off date of July 1990 and do not use any ingredient that has been tested on animals since that date.
In spite of repeated requests BUAV have refused to correct this misinformation until such time as Green People subscribe to their Humane Cosmetics Standard, owned and operated by BUAV. BUAV charge over £1000 to join the Standard.
BUAV are therefore saying that unless we prove to them that we do not use ingredients that have been recently tested on animals, they will claim that we do. Even though they have no evidence to support this claim and it is absolutely untrue.
Green People are very disappointed that an organisation campaigning for aims that we fully support is behaving in such an irresponsible way, thereby losing credibility, diluting their argument and making their aims more difficult to achieve.
Why don't Green People provide the evidence that BUAV have requested?
Firstly, Green People do not believe we should have to provide evidence to prove that we don't do something, just to prevent an organisation claiming that we do.
Secondly, having assessed the practicalities of subscribing to the Humane Cosmetics Standard standard we have decided that, for the time being at least, we just do not have the resources to collate the documentation required by BUAV to apply for the standard.
We currently produce over 100 different product formulations, each of which contains up to 26 ingredients. In total, we use around 150 different ingredients, many of which are sourced from 4 or 5 alternative suppliers depending on availability and price.
According to the information stated in the Humane Cosmetic Standard application form issued by BUAV, in order to cover our full product range we estimate that we would need to obtain between 400 and 600 different certificates from our suppliers – and these would need to be renewed each year.
As a small company with only ten full-time employees we just don’t have the man-power available to cope with this in-house, and would need to bring in outside help to deal with this – with the associated costs that this would incur. This would be in addition to the fee of over £1000 a year payable to BUAV to join the scheme.
Therefore, whilst we fully support the aims and objective of the BUAV, and are totally opposed to all forms of animal testing of cosmetics and cosmetic ingredients, we cannot at the present time subscribe to their Humane Cosmetics Standard.
It does look like bully boy tatics to me.