Did you know that Dayspring Farm soap is very intentionally environmentally friendly? As Orthodox Christians we take stewardship of creation very seriously. God charged us to have dominion over all things, and in our mind that means care, cultivation and responsibility. In all our choices we ask ourselves "is this caring for what He made?"
Initially we moved to the farm with this in mind, and at the time our attention was on sustainable food (not purchasing food from industrial scale agriculture with its accompanying ecological collateral damage). Little did we know that our journey would lead us to the bathroom sink and shower.
We were longtime body wash users, leaving several cubic feet of plastic bottles in our wake yearly. That stuff smells so good, and for a long time cosmetic perks were the informing factor in my consumer choices. We tried our best to recycle those bottles, and then we learned that not all of them even are recyclable, or aren't recyclable everywhere (we live in a rural area with limited recycling facilities). The majority of those bottles are, themselves, virgin plastic, with no recycling of plastic in their manufacture.
Then we learned that the cleaning products we used were directly contributing to the extinction of orangutans. An enormous number of cleaning products - soaps, body washes, shampoos - contain palm oil or derivatives of palm oil. That wasn't meaningful to me until I learned how the harvest of palm oil in Asia is killing significant numbers of orangutans yearly. Palm oil is in roughly 50% of household products in the western world, including cleaners and foods. For more information visit Orangutan Foundation International. Beyond killing orangutans, palm oil harvesting is environmentally destructive and contributes to climate change. Efforts to sustainably harvest palm oil have been shown to be ineffective.
So, what did we do? Well, first we started using soaps that didn't come in a plastic bottle and didn't contain palm oil (which is harder than you'd think - palm oil derivatives can be tough to spot). Then we went a step further and started making our soaps, without palm oil, using ingredients we could source locally and plentifully. Living in a rural area with many animal processing facilities, tallow and lard are easy to obtain and would often otherwise go to waste. Incidentally, they're also great for our skin, which is why they've been used in soap for centuries and are in many commercially available soaps (albeit with a whole lot of other ingredients we'd rather not put on our skin!).
Dayspring Farm Soap is minimally packaged with a recycled paper label and is intentionally sourced to leave a light environmental footprint. So show the orangutans some love, protect the world you live in, and nurture the skin you're in. We'll help.
Sustainable Soap
