LUSH, which is now selling a palm oil-free soap, has launched a two-pronged campaign to make consumers aware of the impacts of palm cultivation on tropical forests and encourage other consumer-products companies, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Nestle, to reformulate their products using alternatives to palm oil.
"While the cosmetics industry uses approximately 6-7 percent of the global supply of palm oil, the biggest current usage is food, with one out of every ten items in the supermarket, from chips and breads to biscuits and margarine, containing this sinister ingredient," said LUSH in a statement. Until now LUSH used about 60.5 metric tons of palm oil per year. The company has been developing palm oil-free soap base for three years.
"We believe that until global levels of palm use are cut dramatically, there is little hope of a workable sustainable palm oil industry, and the future of the forests, animals and people of Indonesia and Malaysia is bleak," said Brandi Halls, LUSH Communications Manager.
Accompanying the launch of the public awareness campaign, LUSH is selling a tree-shaped soap called "Jungle", one hundred percent of the proceeds from which will be donated to the Rainforest Foundation, a group that campaigns for indigenous rights and rainforest conservation. LUSH is also partnering with the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), an activist group, to convince other companies to source their ingredients responsibly.
LUSH's announcement comes less than a month after the Auckland Zoo pulled Cadbury chocolates from its shops and restaurants following the candy maker's decision to start adding palm oil to its chocolates.
The bans on palm oil by LUSH and Auckland Zoo are a departure from a broader push to use responsibly-sourced palm oil. In recent years, Unilever, Whole Foods, and other companies have pledged to use only sources of palm oil that have been independently verified and certified to meet environmental and social sustainability criteria. But efforts to develop and promote eco-friendly palm oil have stumbled out of the blocks.
Mongabay.com is an environmental science and conservation news website.
