“What’s your favorite soap?” is a question I am asked quite a bit. It’s simple, really simple….the Calendula Herb Unscented Soap. Fragrance-free, bright cheerful color and large bubbles - it’s my favorite everyday facial soap. Being around essential oils and herbs all day long, it’s nice not to smell anything first thing in the morning.
The Calendula soap is the first one of Botanical Earth’s soaps to undergo the change in formula to eliminate palm oil. Palm oil is a highly popular soap making oil for hand made soap. It’s a realitively inexpensive oil, and many soap making books consider it a filler oil….I don’t view it as that. Palm oil has a great syngergy with other oils and creates a wonderful hard soap.
The problem I have found in my search of knowing our ingredient sources, is that I can not find a verifiable source of palm that does not damage rainforest land in either South America or Asia. It’s the palm oil controversy. As the saying goes “all actions create a reaction” so while organic palm oils is great to use in handmade soap, damaging Malaysian and Indoenesia rainforests to plant organic/or non-organic palm trees in order to jump on the organic band wagon, isn’t what I want to use. There’s been a campaign going on for a while to stop the destruction, and when I asked my suppliers all said, yes, we care and don’t buy from sources that are in that region….but none of the suppliers that I could afford to buy from would put it in writing….so if you aren’t willing to do that, do they really know? Or are they just talking the talk?
Some of the worlds top Orang-utan researchers have complied a report, The Oil for Ape Scandal, on the effect of palm oil plantations have caused. Quite a bit of the debris from these plantations is tossed in rivers, While one would think it’s “organic” and would be fine trash, it breaks down and throws off the natural eco-systems of very fragile native lands.
Now there’s two sides to every story and I understand these plantations offer local people jobs and that is vitally important in developing countries. Here’s an article (in pdf) on the American Palm Oil site from one Mayalasian doctor’s view on people and palm. There’s also a section on their site about sustainablity which is good to read. I also realize my stopping the use of palm until I can find a reliable source isn’t going to change much…but it makes me feel I am keeping to Botanical Earth’s policy of “simply be”. When I can find a source that respects people, animals and land - I’ll use them - I love working with palm oil, I just need to find better verifiable sources.
For those that wonder, because soy bean oil is another one that is reputed to harm Asian land - we source our organic soy bean oil from beans grown here in the United States.