I bought some\u00a0lemon myrtle soap the other day.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0At home I noticed ‘Contains NO Animal Products’ written on the side of the box, along with ‘delights and vitalises’ and ‘natural freshness’, amongst the pretty symbols.\u00a0 A closer inspection was required.\u00a0 The spiel on the back described the lemon myrtle tree as being a Queensland rainforest\u00a0species that grows to about 8 meters (sic).\u00a0 ‘Its elegant dark green leaves are intensely aromatic.\u00a0 The extraordinary oil is extracted by steam distillation…’<\/p>\n
I love trees.\u00a0 By now I am thinking what a splendid-sounding, majestic\u00a0tree, and how did they get the leaves that were involved in making\u00a0the soap I bought.\u00a0 The box doesn’t state whether the lemon myrtle trees are farmed or whether they’re native forest trees that are chopped down, so I can only presume it’s the latter not the former.\u00a0 Clearly whoever wrote the box was more concerned with appealing to vegetarians and vegans than tree lovers.\u00a0 If they appreciated native trees themselves, the need to state that the leaves were obtained from farmed trees, would have been obvious.<\/p>\n
It gets worse.\u00a0 Guess what’s up the top of the ingredients list?\u00a0 Palm oil.\u00a0 The third ingredient listed is palm kernel.\u00a0 What’s wrong with buying palm oil products?\u00a0\u00a0Right now, most of the world’s destruction of equatorial rainforests occurs because more cleared land is wanted to grow oil palms.\u00a0 This is especially the case in SE Asia – particularly\u00a0Indonesia,\u00a0Malaysia, PNG\u00a0etc.<\/p>\n
So my fancy soap contains no products from domesticated cattle grazing on native grasslands in harmony with native wildlife.\u00a0 Instead the major ingredient in my soap is derived from a crop which is responsible for massive ecological destruction – destroying habitat for native animals and plants, large and small.<\/p>\n
Next time I’ll be paying more attention to what I’m buying and I suggest others do likewise.\u00a0 It seems very obvious that it is far better to farm domestic breeds of animals in a sustainable and humane fashion, than permanently remove vital habitat for rare and threatened species.<\/p>\n
Avoid purchasing anything containing palm oil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I bought some\u00a0lemon myrtle soap the other day.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0At home I noticed ‘Contains NO Animal Products’ written on the side of the box, along with ‘delights and vitalises’ and ‘natural freshness’, amongst the pretty symbols.\u00a0 A closer inspection was required.\u00a0 The spiel on the back described the lemon myrtle tree as being a Queensland rainforest\u00a0species that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,7],"tags":[160,176],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1586"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1586"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1598,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1586\/revisions\/1598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}