Environment

Welcome back once again for another heaping helping of Littlefoot blog goodness. Today I’m going to be tackling the last of our three founding principles. Last week I covered Sustainability, the week before was Family, so that just leaves the final, and potentially most important principle: Environment.

So this principle of Environment and the principle of sustainability are linked by a fairly obvious thread. What we do and how we do it impacts our environment, therefore how sustainable a practice is determines what the flow on effect is on our environment. For example, Palm oil is a no no for any ethical and sustainable practicing business (like ourselves) because of the way land is cleared to make way for new crop. This large level deforestation and damaging of wildlife and their habitat is not ethical, sustainable or good for the environment.

So with that in mind I wanted to make sure that my business wasn’t going to add to this damaging behaviour. We were going to be better for the environment.

We started by looking at what was in the bottles. Most people who use a shampoo, bodywash or dishwash, for example, never really think about what is in the bottle and what happens to the water these things mix with once it leaves our sinks or showers, but we did. We learned about how synthetic products change the properties of waterways, how the preservatives slow down their ability to break down and impact aquatic life and quality of the water itself. This is a major impact on the environment that is often overlooked and ignored, but we confrontedt head on and dedicated ourselves to find a better way.

And find a better way we did! We eliminated preservatives and synthetic ingredients from our products. We keep it all natural, from the essential oils we use to scent everything to the vegetable glycerine that keeps skin hydrated (no palm oil here), everything we make is made to be better for your skin and the water its going into.

This isn’t the only way we looked at our environment and said “how can we be part of the solution?” the next step was the bottles. Other companies claim to use 100% recycled plastic (a fallacy we will cover later) and just add to the ever growing plastic issue, but we wanted something truly recyclable, so we went with glass! Made from natural ingredients (sand) and easily recycled our bottles won’t end up floating in some garbage island in the middle of the ocean. This goes for our bulk containers too! All our product that we encourage people to refill from comes back to us where we sanitize it, refill it and send it back out, closing the loop!

We want our hard work to pay off and leave our environment in a better place than when we found it. Together with you all we can all work together to make the future a little green for the next generation of little feet.