Our perspective regarding Palm Oil

Palm is a fast growing natural resource that doesn’t need acres and acres to grow prolifically. Oil palms produce more oil per acre of land than any other vegetable oil crop in the world.

We are only too aware of the controversy over the use of palm oil, and it’s something our customers, and potential customers mention to us a lot.

We have a genuine interest and commitment to the environment whilst being practical and realistic with our ethics regarding this. All plant oils in our products are sourced from sustainable organic sources and in the case of palm oil from accredited organic, RSPO-certified sustainable plantations.

What is the issue with palm oil?

The big issue is deforestation, how this impacts the environment and the natural habitats of certain species along with a lack of local alternatives.

If there was no palm, there would still be deforestation. To stop using palm would be even more devastating and simply shift issues and create problems elsewhere, not forgetting the impact on locals who earn their living from harvesting the crops.

 What is palm oil?

Palm oil is a vegetable oil that is used in a lot of day-to-day products including food and cosmetics. You will find it, or it’s by products, in the ingredients for some of our soaps using a few different names depending upon its extraction, mostly: Sodium Palm Kernalate or Sodium Palmate or Palm Kernel Acid or Elaeis Gyineensis Oil.

Palm is super versatile, hence it’s popularity, for us it is a great ingredient to use in soap: it is vegan, hypoallergenic, skin identical, contains loads of beneficial properties (more on this below) and doesn’t require lots of “messing around with” to make it useable.

Whilst there are many small growers of palm oil, some in syndicates, there are even more very large plantations across the prime growing regions: Africa, Costa Rica, Indonesia and Malaysia are the top palm oil-producing countries in the world. The oil is extracted from the seeds of the oil palm tree, normally the seeds are sent to mills in the same country for processing before the resulting oil is distributed around the world.

What is the problem with palm oil?

As global demand has grown, palm is notoriously the cheapest vegetable oil to buy as well as being very versatile, the plantations are expanding resulting in vast areas of rainforest being cut down to adopt their land. These areas are often vital habitat for species such as the orangutan’s, tiger’s, rhino’s and elephant’s.

These rain forests are mostly situated on peat soils which hold massive additional carbon that can be released when the forest is culled. This is where the big climate protests come from.

However, Oil Palms don’t have to be grown on de- forested land, the challenge here is that by felling forests the governments and commercial oil giants can sell the logs to offset the costs of planting the palms! These forests are also in ideal growing regions for the palms and close to where they originate making for an easy expansion. 

Why we don’t sanction palm oil?

Simply switching to a different type of vegetable oil is likely to result in significant consequences:

1. There would be a big rise in demand for land to grow other vegetable oil crops to replace the demand for palm oil which would inevitably lead to even more forests or environmentally important land being lost.

2. The price of palm oil would most certainly drop and thereby actually increase demand in areas of the world such as India and China where biofuels are in heavy use.

3. Palm is versatile and from our perspective contains many beneficial properties for your skin (It is rich in antioxidants, beta-carotene, vitamin E, and fatty acids such as oleic and linoleic acids) so using other oils is likely to require further ingredients (for mass market products these would be synthetic) to counteract and balance the loss of natural properties and to act as preservatives.

Where do French Soaps stand in regard to Palm Oil?

We are a small independent company that work with our savonneries to ensure we and they are working sustainably and responsibly. We are not going to make any dramatic headline attracting zero-deforestation commitments because we believe using responsibly sourced palm oil is a positive solution to an over congested and frequently confused arena.

We often refer our customer to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the international body that oversees and certifies sustainable palm oil. Our Savonneries are 100% committed to maintaining their annual accreditation for this as part of their wider sustainability pledges and for their own credibility.

Yes, the RSPO has some negative press itself, no large organisation is perfect, they are working in a complex area to implement robust stewardship strategies, support the growers, the locals, the species and the environment. By only buying from savonneries that source palm oil from traceable plantations that have not contributed to deforestation, we can be confident that our business and you, our customers, are helping to keep forests standing and orangutans and more, safe and thriving.

This will be an ongoing debate for years to come. We say embrace any formulation of soap that works for you, we give you our commitment that products we import are from brands that source raw ingredients responsibly, ethically and sustainably. If however you choose to avoid palm, we have a large collection of soaps that are entirely palm free.