Environmental Sustainability

Traditionally handcrafted Shea Butter is one of the most sustainable ingredients in the natural skin care industry. Every step of the handcrafting process in making our Shea Butter Skin Care products contributes to environmental sustainability.

Sustainable Harvest, Sustainable Ecology

Shea trees grow wild in their natural environment and are not grown in massive plantations; therefore they do not need synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Shea fruit for our skin care products are hand gathered; there are no massive harvesting machines burning fossil fuels and compacting the soil. Every part of the harvested shea fruits are used in some way. While the Shea Butter is the marketable product, the shells and the non butter particulates are used as natural fertilizers on fields. To reduce waste, we also use the non-butter particulates as exfoliants in our soaps.

Sustainable Production, Sustainable Economy

All of the oils and butters for our skin care products that we make in Togo are extracted with traditional methods. We also take the care to only use non-plantation grown coconuts, palm fruit and cacao beans. Plantations have multiple environmental, social and economic consequences, while the small farms we support have been sustainable for centuries.

Our efforts to be environmentally sustainable are not limited to our Togo centers and production. In our production facility in Washington, we use composting toilets and pay additional fees for renewable energy. We reuse packaging material and recycle what we cannot reuse. We have also taken an additional cost to purchase glass containers for our Shea Butter and creams to limit our use of plastic. The plastic we do use is recyclable in almost any area. We encourage you to recycle and reuse our containers.

Our Use of Wood

We do use wood fuel in the production of our shea butter. Although this is not the ideal fuel source, wood is not scarce in central Togo, and the wood is harvested sustainably.

In addition, we are currently training our cooperative members in making flammable briquettes from the powder that is left after the shea butter is extracted. The waste water is put in shallow ponds, evaporated and the remaining powder is pounded into the briquettes. We also use the waste water as a soil amendment; the water is distributed onto fields where it adds needed nutrients and organic matter to the soil.

Plastics

We are becoming increasingly concerned with the amount of plastic in our environment and the impact this plastic has on other living creatures and ecosystems. We have gathered a few links where you can get more information about this:

• Plastics: An Environmental Menace
• the Sixth Basic Food Group
• Get Plastic Out of Your Diet
• Against the Current - The Plastic Sea

In “Get Plastic Out of Your Diet”, author Paul Goettlich states; “There is now 6 times more plastic around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean than zooplankton floating, which is a major food source for sea animals”.(This info comes from Marine Pollution Bulletin, Dec 2001 - 3 years ago!) Paul goes on to say, “A large portion of it is preconsumer plastic that has not been made into a product yet. Called nurdels, they’re physically very much like zooplankton. The researcher who found this, Captain Charles Moore, Director of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, said that new data indicates that the ratio of plastic to zooplankton is even higher in two so-called floating plastic “Garbage Patches” that are each bigger than the State of Texas”. “Nurdles are incorporated into all strata of the oceans with no known method of removal. DDE, a metabolite of DDT, and other dioxin-like chemicals concentrate on the surface of the plastic nurdles at a rate up to a million times that found in the ocean. Captain Moore’s presentation includes images of sea animals that have suffocated and starved as a result. Even more startling is seeing plastic bits incorporated into the flesh of the sea animals”.