They’ve been working against animal testing for 21 years, but now is amping up its campaign to a whole new level with the announcement it will reward groups or individuals working in cruelty-free scientific research, awareness-raising and lobbying with its Lush Prize.
The £250,000 annual prize fund has been developed alongside UK magazine Ethical Consumer in a bid to stamp out animal testing once and for all following continual failure for the practice to be banned.
21 years ago, we launched a policy that promised that there would there be no animal testing of our product or ingredients,” says Lush co-founder Mark Constantine. Sadly animal testing for the cosmetics industry is still widespread. So here at Lush we are trying another tack. Today we are launching a prize worth a quarter of a million pounds and we hope to fund the Eureka moment: when a breakthrough is made to end animal testing of cosmetics forever.”
Ethical Consumer editor Rob Harrison adds, The reasons that animal testing is still widespread are complex. This is why the Prize has five different elements including lobbying regulators and training researchers in non-animal methods. By targeting significant new funds each year at each of these key pressure point, the Prize hopes to make a real difference to replacing animal testing with effective replacement methods.”
The Lush Prize will see £50k each go to the Science Prize – for the development of replacement non-animal tests, Training Prize – training researchers in non-animal methods, Lobbying Prize – policy interventions to promote the use of replacements, Public Awareness Prize – public-awareness raising of ongoing testing and Young Researcher Awards – to five post-graduates specialising in replacements research.
