Environmental Sustainability

"Environmental sustainability is development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

- World Commission on Environment and Development

Our goal of alleviating poverty cannot be attained without environmental sustainability. The fact that traditionally handcrafted Shea Butter is one of the most sustainable ingredients in the natural skin care industry is essential to our journey.

Sustainable Harvest, Sustainable Ecology

Shea trees grow wild in their natural environment and cannot be 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 shea butter is the marketable product, the shells and the non butter particulates are used as natural fertilizers on fields. In addition, we also use the non-butter particulates as exfoliants in our shea butter soaps.

Sustainable Ingredients

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.

Sustainable Production

Our efforts to be environmentally sustainable are not limited to our Shea Butter Cooperative. In Lacey, Washington we produce all our products by hand in small batches. We make everything ourselves - we do not outsource our production. Because of this, we can keep batch size small, reduce energy consumption, and increase quality by creating products on demand.

Sustainable Packaging

We also make careful packaging choices. We use glass wherever possible - all our handcrafted shea butters, body creams and face creams are packaged in glass. While lotions and hair care items are too heavy to be put in glass, we use easily recyclable HDPE and PETE plastics only. We source our packaging as close geographically to our facility as possible. For example, our EveryDay Shea bottles are manufactured in Salt Lake City, Utah. In addition, our folding cartons and shipping cartons are made with 25 miles from our facility and printed in Seattle. All of these efforts help reduce our carbon consumption.

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:

• 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) 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".