Palm oil is the most versatile of all vegetable oils, but despite its popularity, it's highly controversial. It can be found in our favorite crackers, our go-to lipstick shade, and in many of our other personal care items. Without palm oil, many of your favorite soaps and lotions just wouldn't be the same, and we believe it's possible to promote sustainable palm oil consumption.
Manufacturing with Sustainable Palm Oil
Palm oil is a soap making ingredient with a very high public profile. It's a vegetable oil used in a wide range of products that consumers use every day; it’s in our food, our detergents, and our personal care products. It’s a versatile ingredient, but its versatility has made it so desirable that common harvesting practices cause incredible devastation to animals, people, and the land on which it is grown.
Palm oil farming is one of the world’s leading drivers of rainforest destruction, as its unbridled expansion pushes into some of the world’s most biodiverse regions, causing havoc to orangutan species, indigenous peoples, and the land on which they rely. This is a fact that we are very aware of at Twincraft, and we've made it our mission to help encourage the use of sustainable palm oil and tackle the problem head on, rather than avoiding the issue and pursuing alternative oil sources.
We are in a position to enforce change in the industry, and strive to educate our business partners and consumers at large to better understand palm oil, its benefits, and the good that certification bodies are doing in the fight against rainforest destruction.
RSPO - Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil
RSPO - the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil - is an organization that works to advance the production, procurement, finance, and use of sustainable palm oil in products used all over the world. Their goal is to transform global markets to make sustainable palm oil the standard, and work to make the entire supply chain sustainable and ethical. As a group, they monitor and evaluate the economic, social, and environmental impacts of this critical ingredient, and hold all stakeholders accountable throughout the supply chain to ensure that their goals are met.
RSPO has established a set of environmental and social criteria for companies to qualify to make Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO). When businesses adhere to these guidelines, the impact of palm oil cultivation is drastically reduced. Worldwide, RSPO has more than 3,000 members that are committed to making a positive impact on the planet.
All of our soap base is available with an RSPO claim attached to it, whether it is RSPO Mass Balance, RSPO Segregated, or RSPO certified through Credits or Book & Claims:
- RSPO Mass Balance (MB) - This is a mix of palm oil using uncertified with certified oil and not traceable to the source. Brands using Mass Balance can claim that the palm oil used in their products supports the production of certified palm oil.
- RSPO Segregated (SG) - This label is for certified palm oil from estates/plantations that is kept separate from material from non-RSPO certified estates/plantations at every stage of production, processing, refining and manufacturing throughout the supply chain.
- RSPO Credits/Book & Claim - This portion of the supply chain is not monitored for the presence of sustainable palm oil. Instead, manufacturers and retailers can buy Credits from RSPO-certified growers, crushers and independent smallholders to promote the overall use of sustainable palm when it's not available with MB or SG claims.
For more information about RSPO claims & supply chains, please visit their website.
Why Can't We Replace Palm Oil?
We've had customers come to Twincraft with the intention of not using any palm oil in the products that we manufacture for them. While this is possible to do by using alternatives, such as coconut oil soap base, it is not the way we prefer to develop products. We strongly believe that by avoiding using palm oil, we are no longer encouraging the use of sustainable practices, and palm oil has many qualities that make it a preferable ingredient to its counterparts.
- Replacing palm oil with other vegetable oils, such as rapeseed, sunflower, or soybean, would require more land be deforested. Palm trees produce 4 - 10 times more oil than comparable crops, per unit of cultivated land.
- Millions of farmers and their families work in the palm oil sector in Indonesia and Malaysia. These are areas with high rates of poverty, and if palm oil related jobs were eliminated, this would create tremendous hardships for these workers.
- Palm oil is a unique ingredient, and many formulas don't allow for easy substitution with other vegetable oils. This is as true for its use in food as it is in bar soap.
RSPO Claims for Bar Soap, Skincare & Deodorant
RSPO claims have historically been most popular for bar soaps, but sustainable materials are becoming increasingly more available for other product categories that we support at Twincraft Skincare, including lotions, body washes, and natural deodorants.
Our sourcing and regulatory teams are working closely with our vendor partners towards the goal of supporting RSPO claims across all product categores, and not just with bar soap. This requires additional certifications and audits for our multiple production facilities, but we're focused on driving this initiatives just as we have done for the solid cleansing space.
