Certified palm oil free

Greenscents is certified palm oil free with POFCAP.
That means every product in the range with no palm oil and no palm oil derivatives.

Our certifiers – POFCAP

Based in Australia, POFCAP is an independent, not for profit Palm Oil Free Certification Trademark. POFCAP's goals are 2 fold:

1. To enable consumers, who wish to avoid palm oil for allergy, dietary or ethical reasons, to see at a quick glance if a product, company or process is palm oil free. When consumers see the certification trademark on a product's packaging or as a part of a company's marketing they know it has been thoroughly researched and certified by an International and Independent Certification Trademark Programme.
2. To create an alternate funding stream and distribute all profit from this Certification Trademark back into organisations working hard to protect rainforests around the world and all they contain.

We really liked these objectives and Greenscents is proud to be funding an organisation where profits reach NGO's working to save the rainforests. We also love the POFCAP logo which you see above.

This is Jabrick, the orangutan who lost her mother aged 1 and her life aged 2 as a result of rainforest destruction. A poignant story but an uplifting one as POFCAP was born from this tragedy. The POFCAP logo is dedicated to Jabrick and all the other animals who have lost their lives due to deforestation and habitat destruction.

Why is the Greenscents range palm oil free?

Palm oil is not sustainable. Palm oil plantations turn a paradise of pristine forests into an inert monoculture. If the world continues to demand cheap palm oil as an ingredient then the cycle of tropical forest decline will continue. The Indo-Malaysian rainforest makes up at least 10% of the world’s remaining tropical rainforests and this is where most of the palm oil plantations grow. But relentless deforestation, much of it illegal, is devastating biodiversity and leading to the death or displacement of many of our most iconic species.

• From 2002 to 2019, Indonesia lost 9.48 million hectares of primary forest, making up 36% of its total tree cover loss in the same time period (Global Forest Watch, 2020)
• Half of the Bornean orangutan population has been exterminated in less than 16 years.
• More than three-quarters of Indonesia’s Tesso Nilo National Park, home to tigers, orangutans and elephants, has been converted into illegal palm oil plantations.
• Globally, 193 critically endangered, threatened and vulnerable species are threatened by palm oil production (Greenpeace, 2019).

But this is only part of the story.

Here in Europe, we have developed new regulations to prevent the import of unsustainably sourced palm oil. Yet most sustainability standards (i.e. RSPO) have been plagued by issues of non-compliance and deforestation continues unabated. As ‘degraded forest’ can be legally cleared in Indo-Malaysia, this means that the majority of remaining forest is vulnerable to clearance.

Greenpeace has consistently demonstrated that RSPO palm oil is a ‘con’. The Greenpeace International report “Burning Down the House” revealed that members of the industry body responsible for the ‘certified sustainable palm oil’ label were at the centre of the 2019 Indonesia fires crisis. RSPO members have been linked to more than 1.2 million hectares of fires across Indonesia since 2015.

Palm oil has a very complicated supply chain and it is doubtful that any scheme will be able to guarantee sustainable production. Currently, palm oil products can earn a ‘sustainable’ certification if 99% comes from freshly deforested land. These certifications are worthless and cannot be trusted!

For more information on palm oil plantations and tropical forest loss see:

Eyes on the Forest report “Palm oil plantations operating in the Riau Forest Estate (April 2018)

Hughes, A. “Have Indo-Malaysian forests reached the end of the road?” Biological Conservation vol 223, July 2018 pp 129-137