Palm Oil in Soapmaking

FACT:  Palm oil makes great soap.  FACT:  Be Natural does not and will never use Palm Oil in soapmaking.

Lets look into this a bit further.

Palm Oil needs land to grow.  Much of the best growing regions for palm oil are in the Asia region, where precious rainforest is still being cut down to make way for palm plantations.  Palm oil led de-forestation is the single biggest human induced cause of climate change.   This is because palm oil plantations have cleared the way through carbon capturing ancient forests – the lungs of the earth.  Deforestation has a massive impact on soaring global temperatures.

One organisation, Say No To Palm Oil, estimates that every single hour, the area of the size of 300 football fields is being cleared in Indonesia and Malaysia.  Of course, this ALSO causes huge amounts of damage to the endangered species that live in these areas.

The orangutan is under serious threat – and could become extinct within the next 50 years – as a direct result of the palm oil industry.  That is not cool – why would you choose to use products with palm oil in it knowing this?

There is also numerous and widespread human right abuses in the palm oil industry.  These abuses include child labourers being exploited and human trafficking.  Read more about this topic here.

Here at Be Natural we spent time investigating the Responsible Roundtable on Palm Oil Production, which is an organisation that business can sign up to in order to say they use “sustainable palm oil”.  However, after our investigation, we discovered that there is no way of knowing that palm oil is sustainable – as the criteria is so weak and enforcement so lax that “sustainable” has no meaning.  So when you read that a country uses sustainable palm oil – don’t be fooled, it may not be sustainable at all.

There are numerous other amazing oils that can be used in soapmaking – coconut oil, cocoa butter, sweet almond oil, shea butter, rice bran oil – the list goes on.  All of these oils have fantastic skin food qualities and make beautiful hard soap with great lather.  And by using a Be Natural Soap, you are not contributing to the terrible impact of palm oil production.