It is clear that we cannot protect any one species in an ecosystem without protecting the ecosystem itself. That is the key message behind the Protect Our Species campaign.
Earth Day Network
As Earth Month winds down, it’s important to keep ourselves committed to reducing harm to our environment year round. The theme of Earth Day 2019 was Protect Our Species, and often when we think about what species to protect, that decision comes down, not to who or what is in most danger, but who or what is the cutest, and able to get the most attention. We all know about elephants and pandas, and we’re happy to help save them! But often species like insects, fish, crustaceans and particularly plants get overlooked. Deforestation is a critical part of the fight to save all our species because forests and plants provide not only oxygen for our atmosphere but they also house, protect and feed the majority of species on our planet.
Using natural products means also considering the impact of production and at The Good Planet, we want to avoid contributing to the destructive and often unsupervised or illegal harvesting of plant species. That’s why we’ve been making some changes around the store over the last few months and we wanted to let you know exactly what's coming!
Rosewood Essential Oil is a sweet smelling, floral essential oil that comes specifically from the Aniba Roseaodora evergreen tree found primarily in Brazil. Unfortunately, like so many other species of flora, Aniba Roseaodora is currently endangered, with a high likelihood of moving to critical status. While this essential oil is a very popular scent with great aromatherapy benefits, the process of collection produces about 1% oil to the amount of wood used and based on demand, clearly contributes greatly to the deforestation of some of our most important and dense forests. We have a small amount left in store of this oil individually, but once it’s gone, it won’t be returning - unless they can reverse the species loss and perfect a better way of collection/distillation!
Rosewood is also a key player in one of our most popular blends, which posed a bigger challenge than eliminating the oil from our selection, but we were sure our customers would support us in moving towards a more sustainable option! Our Tofino blend relies most heavily on a combo of Cedarwood and Rose Geranium, but also included Rosewood, and replicating that particular combo of scents had us scratching our heads. After some serious experimentation, Ho Wood seems to be the answer to our confusion. This wood is related to the plant that also produces Camphor. However, aroma wise, it captures the floral notes of Rosewood. It took us some time to fit Ho Wood in perfectly to our Tofino blend, but we have made the adjustments and Tofino will be changing officially as soon as our current stock is gone.
We have also been tinkering with our bar soap recipe for a while now, in an effort to remove palm oil from the mix! Our palm oil has always been sustainably harvested but we try to keep our impact as low as possible. After some more experimentation, we've found the perfect blend (with no palm oil) that maintains the lather, moisture and density that our customers love about our bar soaps. We began to make the switch a few months ago and all the bar soaps in store are now completely palm free! So if you haven’t already, stop by the store and see how the new mixtures holds up!