LUSH cosmetics launches campaign against palm oil
Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.comAugust 10, 2009
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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.
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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.
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Nevertheless curtailing global demand for palm oil will be a challenge for green groups. Oil palm is the world's most productive oilseed, generating more vegetable oil at a lower cost than any other crop per unit of area. A single hectare of oil palm may yield nearly 6,000 liters of crude palm oil, outperforming soy, canola/rapeseed, and corn by ten- to twenty-fold. Further, the recent drop in palm oil prices have made it more attractive as a feedstock for biofuel production, opening an entire new market for the oilseed. And although Western governments are talking of banning palm oil-based biodiesel due to worries about emissions associated with its production on tropical forest lands, other countries, including China and India, are gearing up to burn more biodiesel as car ownership expands. Thus it seems likely that demand for palm oil will remain strong.
 Peat forest conversion in Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. |
But in the face of large-scale destruction of forests across Indonesia and Malaysia for oil palm plantations, many environmentalists remain skeptical of the palm oil industry. With fires currently burning out-of-control in key palm oil-producing parts of Borneo and Sumatra, they have good reason to be suspicious.
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