After a lot of back and forth, and a little digging, my mom and I decided to keep her original recipe the same. We loved the bar for our families, even if I thought that I didn't love that it contained Palm Oil - something I had been boycotting for years and years. I am still proud to offer our palm-free line, but after reading about the issue, I am tentatively supporting the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil movement. When the alternative is that the rainforest is still razed, and this time to make way for crops with a greater negative impact on the world, I support anything that aims to mitigate the destruction.
From the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil's own website:
"In some regions palm oil has been produced irresponsibly. Forests have been cleared or damaged to grow palm oil, which has impacted both wildlife and local communities. And the workers and farmers producing palm oil in some places have suffered poor working conditions and low pay.
There have been calls to boycott palm oil because of these negative impacts. Yet switching to alternative vegetable oils to palm oil wouldn’t reduce these impacts. Sunflower, rapeseed, and soy have much lower yields per hectare than oil palm, so, in fact, more land would be needed to produce an equivalent amount of oil. What’s more, millions of farmers and their families work on oil palm plantations and smallholdings. This provides them with the income for basic essentials such as food, clean water, and housing. Plus it allows many workers to send their children to school."
https://rspo.org/why-sustainable-palm-oil/