Indigo Essences

Wow what a minefield - weighing up the pro’s and con’s of this and that. I think Innocent drinks have just employed someone to oversee their green-ness. Our business is very small, Bar and I do just about everything, with some part time help. Spending hours researching green-ness is just not feasible. Nor is hopping on a passing jet to see for ourselves. So we have to take people at their word at a lot of the time. For instance when we decided to make candles we checked out all the possible ingredients.Firstly the main ingredient, the wax.
Paraffin - no way, fossil fuel etc etc

Soy - gm - don’t want to support gm production

Beeswax - not vegan friendly, not to mention the poor bees working overtime pumping out all that wax

Palm wax - ummm, as long as comes from old plantations and not somewhere where the rainforest is being ripped out.
Not one of the alternatives is a perfect solution, they all have drawbacks. We weighed the pros and cons and eventually opted for palm wax. Palm wax is hot stuff just now. Everyone is looking for renewable alternatives to fossil fuels and palm is a popular one. Unfortunately this also means that that people are loosing the run of themselves and tearing out acres of rain-forest to plant more and more palms. The worst place at the moment seems to be Borneo where the orangutan population is being decimated by all this development, not to mention the rain forest itself. There is a group called the RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) which sets standards for sustainable palm oil production. Our candle maker assures us that all his wax is sourced from plantations in mainland Malaysia that are members of RSPO. In many cases in Malaysia, old coconut plantations are being converted to palm as it is much more profitable these days than coconut.It looks like the world demand for palm as a fossil fuel replacement will only increase in the immediate future until other technologies are in place so the best we can do is support plantations that are sustainable, that do adhere to the RSPO standards for production and work practices. And short of taking a plane to Malaysia, we have to take someone’s word that this is so…..I’l write about the essential oils nextbut now, off to the airport in my big petrol car to collect our UK distributors who have just taken a carbon heavy flight over from Southamptom to come see us…..