Hands off palm

Hands off palm

The cosmetics producer Lush is setting up a forum to find alternatives to palm oil, a crop regarded as unsustainable but that is still found in many everyday products such as soap and moisturiser

Claudia Cahalane
guardian.co.uk,
Monday March 3 2008

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday March 03 2008. It was last updated at 16:02 on March 03 2008.

Cosmetics account for 7-8% of palm oil usage. A traditionally cheap, versatile and plentiful oil, it is used in everyday items such as soap and moisturiser.

But palm oil production has often involved highly destructive practices in places such Malaysia and Indonesia, where forest is cleared to make way for land to grow the profitable crop.
So the cosmetics industry is being urged to find alternatives.

Cosmetics producer Lush says it believes manufacturers of soap and other toiletries need to start acting fast. It has set up a forum for beauty companies that are seeking alternatives to palm oil.

And last November, Lush introduced "Greenwash", its first soap without a palm oil base. Within the next few months, all soaps at Lush's 500 stores worldwide will use a mixture of coconut, rapeseed and sunflower oils in their base instead of palm.

Lush says the forum will be called Actively Seeking Alternatives to Palm (ASAP), and has already attracted interest from a handful of small soap and food businesses. It is hoped that major retailers will engage with the forum too.

To date the big manufacturers appear to have no intention to drop palm oil. Instead, the likes of Unilever, Tesco, Boots, Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer want to continue working with the industry-led Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) to gain access to less destructive sources of the oil.

The roundtable, set up in 2005, is due to start stamping products with a sustainable mark of approval at the end of the year. The stamp was due out at the beginning of 2008, but has been delayed.

Joanna Keohan, a spokewoman for Tesco, says the company attended the last two RSPO general meetings in Singapore and Kuala Lumpar and will be working on introducing the sustainable mark into its products as soon as possible.

However, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Lush do not believe the measures offered by the RSPO are sufficiently "aggressive", primarily because they will still allow the clearing of aged forests, and will be difficult to enforce.

Andrew Butler, campaigns manager at Lush says: "We looked at joining the RSPO, but it is not being aggressive enough in dealing with the problems. We could have taken the Body Shop route and moved to Colombia, where palm oil production is less intensive and more ethical at the moment, but we saw that this might just be shifting the problem.

"If everyone reduced their use of palm oil by 50% and boycotted any biofuels using it, then it could be a sustainable oil. There's not enough time to sit and pontificate - the public need to put pressure on manufacturers now," urges Butler.

The company's soap base supplier, Cay's, already works with other multinational companies and is willing to provide those with alternatives to palm oil for toiletries.

Andrew Jenkins, sustainable products development manager at Boots, says: "We were one of the first to join the RSPO in 2005, ahead of the Body Shop and the Co-op. We don't use vast quantities of neat palm oil, but it is in the palmates and glycerine we use. Boots wants the whole industry to be more sustainable, and we do take the point from Friends of the Eearth and Greenpeace on the deforestation."

Jenkins says that some palmates – a binding ingredient in soap - can be made from vegetable oil, but in other instances, palm oil is the only ingredient it can use.

Alternatives in some cases, he explains, could include soya oil, but he is wary of "jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire" by choosing another oil that becomes unsustainable.

Trevor Gorin, a spokesman for Unilever – which helped establish the RSPO – says the company has been looking at the sustainable palm oil issue for many years. Unilever has reduced the amount of palm oil it uses, and does source some sustainable palm oil, he says. "Six years ago, we used 1.7m tonnes of palm oil a year. Now it's 800,000 tonnes." Gorin attributes this reduction to using different oils, changing product lines, and new production methods.
But Ed Matthews, a Friends of the Earth campaigner who's worked on palm oil issues for a number of years, says that because there is a danger of shifting the problem to other oils, the best solution to this problem, as with many