Sandstouch soaps are made by combining coconut oil with a variety of plant oils such as grapeseed, canola, sunflower, olive and sesame along with sodium hydroxide (soda api) and water.

Most commercial soaps are made using palm oil. We at Sandstouch will not use palm oil in our soaps and these are some of the reasons why.

• Most of the world’s palm-oil comes from  plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia;
• Most of these plantations are on the islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan (Borneo);
• Indonesia is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the country with the fastest rate of deforestation in the world;
• Kalimantan has lost half its forest cover, while Sumatra has lost more than 70 per cent;
• Indonesia aims to increase the rate of deforestation over the next ten years;
• The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that by 2020 98% of the Indonesian and Malaysian rainforest will be gone;
• The palm-oil industry is largely responsible: it has destroyed over 10 million hectares of rainforest to create oil-palm plantations in Sumatra and Kalimantan alone;
• The forest that the oil-palm industry targets is the only remaining habitat of the orang-utan;
• Almost 90 per cent of orang-utan habitat has now disappeared;
• Orang-utan populations are declining fast; up to 10,000 are killed each year;
• Oil-palm plantations are often forcibly established on land traditionally owned by indigenous people;
• Plantation workers work for low wages and live in horrific conditions so rather than generating jobs, the palm oil industry  actually traps people in poverty;
• Palm oil companies set forest fires to clear land, releasing huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere;
• They also clear, drain and burn peat-land, generating huge amounts of CO2 and contributing to Indonesia's status as the world's third largest CO2 polluter, behind the US and China.

The Tale of a Tiger

The Sumatran tiger is Indonesia’s only remaining tiger species. It is extremely threatened. There are estimated to be only 400 Sumatran tigers left.

A key factor behind the rapidly declining tiger population is the loss of its habitat.

Indonesia has undertaken to protect critical tiger habitats. One of these is Bukit Batabuh in Riau Province which has been classified as a protected area since the mid-1990s.

In October 2010, the World Wildlife Fund released footage taken four months earlier of a tiger walking up to a hidden heat-activated video camera in Bukit Batabuh and sniffing it. A week later the same camera recorded video of bulldozers clearing trees for an illegal palm oil plantation. The next day it watched a tiger walking through the devastated landscape.

Protection policies have limited effect. The demand for palm oil drives people to wreak havoc on the environment. The easiest thing we as individuals can do to try to stop this is to look a little more closely at the ingredients in the foods and cosmetics we buy, avoid products containing palm oil and thus reduce demand, drive down the price and make illegal plantations unprofitable.