11/10/2011 (Business World) - IF YOU were told that your bar of soap was killing off animals in the forest, you’d probably want to stop bathing. Bad news is that the first half of that statement is true; the good news is there are alternatives to becoming a walking advertisement of eau de phew.

Production of palm oil, a component of soap (and, for the record, chips, shampoo, and other items at the grocery), has cut through vast swathes of rain forest, forced indigenous people off the land and resulted in the loss of some of the most important habitats in the planet, leading to the endangerment of the orangutan.

It is estimated that within the next 15 years, 98% of the rain forests of Malaysia and Indonesia -- where 90% of the world’s palm oil exports come from -- will be gone, and with them the orangutan. Almost 90% of orangutan habitat has already disappeared, and if current trends of habitat loss continue, they may become extinct in the wild in 10 years.

If that weren’t enough to ruin your day, these rain forests are usually cleared by burning -- deforestation is already responsible for over 20% of global carbon emissions. Between 1997 and 1998, the emissions from the forest fires in Indonesia were equivalent to 40% of all the global emissions from burning fossil fuels that year.

“The thought that if I don’t see an orangutan in the next few years, I’ll never see one in the wild, just makes me want to cry. It’s not correct.

What are we doing, why are we doing this? We’ve been given this beautiful place to live and we’re slowly destroying it,” Rowena Bird, co-owner and international retail director and product creator of Lush, told BusinesssWorld.

“I’m not 100% perfect, none of us are. I’m vegetarian... I’m not 100% blameless, but I do care, and if I can do something to make awareness or I can make a difference somewhere, or if we can [make a difference] as a company, then that’s what we choose to do.”

And when Ms. Bird makes up her mind to do something, it’s good as done. There’s a tattoo on her wrist that can attest to this -- she had it inked last year, on her 50th birthday, simply because it was part of her bucket list.

Phasing out palm oil
A year was spent developing a substitute for palm oil -- to create the world’s first commercially available palm-free soap base, so they claim -- in partnership with UK-based soap manufacturer Kay’s; as a result, they’ve now reduced annual palm oil use by 250,000 kilograms.

It took Lush two years in total but the company can now say that it’s completely “palm-free.”

Initially, the palm-free soaps were not up to par, but Ms. Bird assures that they’ve now perfected the recipe so the consumer is unable to detect a difference in the product they were using before and those they are using now.

They’ve also come out with several new products (30 just this year), including the palm oil-free Jungle Soap (P295), a bright green tree-shaped soap with a grassy scent.

All proceeds from the sales of Jungle Soap will be donated to the Friends of The Earth Foundation, which works to ensure the long-term protection of rain forests by securing the rights of indigenous communities to land, life and livelihood.

“In the last 10 years or so I became more and more aware that we all need to become environmentalists... if you’ve actually been outside and you’ve enjoyed seeing forests, seeing wildlife, you’ve got to care because that’s actually disappearing and its through our greed for a chief ingredient like palm oil,” said Ms. Bird.

Being conscientious hasn’t hurt sales any, either.

“The sales have gone up. I would think it’s about 7% now. I think people have started to sort of think, ‘Upon my word, there is no need for that,’” she added, noting that they did a similar mind-set-conversion when it came to using plant-based soaps and organic ingredients, and insisted on using human volunteers rather than animals for product trials.

“We would like it to be where you wouldn’t have to say that you don’t test on animals. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was just the norm that people don’t test on animals? Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to say that we are a company that buys from companies that do not do any animal testing whatsoever? That everybody did that? ... We’d all be making a difference and not just one small company.”

New products
Also coming up this month are new additions to Lush’s bath bomb (aka ballistics) line, and the new Ultrabalm, Ms. Bird’s favorite product to date, which is made from organic cold-pressed jojoba oil, candelillia wax and rose wax. She describes it as the “natural version of Vaseline” and praises its versatility, as it can be used to moisturize lips, hands, hair, cuti-cles, or “any bits that chafe and chap,” plus tame eyebrows and enhance perfume besides.

She compares her passion -- and that of her co-founders and four other “co-creators” still very active at the lab -- for creating soaps as that of a fine-dining chef perfecting a recipe and thereby very selective of his ingredients. While the manufacturing is limited to Japan, Canada, Croatia, Australia and the UK, the ingredients are sourced all over the world.

Their shea butter comes from Ghana and supports the women’s cooperative that supplies it, whereas their rose oil comes from Turkey, labored over by itinerant workers whose children are educated by a mobile school that Lush pays to maintain.

Now that coconut oil is used in the soap base -- and the Philippines has plenty -- she says the company will also be looking into whether they can source that ingredient from here.

There’s hope for us yet.