Can Your Suds Make A Difference? Soap Gets Political
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They YouTubed, you listened: After Greenpeace video bashing Dove swept through the Internet last year, parent company Unilever, the single biggest buyer of palm oil in the world, conceded defeat and agreed to an immediate deforestation for palm oil in South East Asia and to take a leadership role within the industry to build support for the moratorium with companies like Kraft, Nestle and Cadburys. They’ll also pressure on palm oil suppliers to get involved, and lobby the Indonesian government to support the proceedings.
Why is this important? It’s just soap, right?
Wrong. Palm oil is one of the world’s most versatile oils and is used in everything from cosmetics to household products to foods. A six-fold increase in demand in the last 20 years has led to vast clearances of South East Asian rainforests.
In Borneo approximately six football fields of rainforest are cleared every minute.
This type of vast deforestation not only impacts global warming, it also creates dangerous working conditions for indigenous populations (especially women) and dramatically affects endangered species like the Sumatran rhino and Asian elephant, which are headed for extinction due to loss of natural habitat.
But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Last July, the Body Shop became the first cosmetics and toiletries retailer to introduce sustainable palm oil to the global beauty industry. Sustainable palm oil production utilizes far less destructive planting methods and protects rainforest biodiversity. Through the Body Shop Foundation, the company supports small-scale farming projects committed to sustainable production methods in many countries where they source their products.
Can buying a bar of soap make a difference? The Body Shop alone sells 14.5 million bars of soap a year. Sounds like a few football fields to me.
