Carbon Neutrality Program | Rain Organica Sustainable Skincare
Rain Organica's Sustainability Practices
As a sustainable skincare brand wildly concerned about waste and our carbon footprint, Rain Organica seeks ethically sourced ingredients to ensure a living wage for farmers + harvesters AND seeks to provide you with skincare made from sustainably sourced ingredients.
If you like to research your brands first, check out all the sustainable and ethical certifications for our skincare ingredients here. Zero Waste, EcoCert, and Fair Trade/Fair for Life are peppered liberally throughout that page.
Ingredients are just the first step in skincare product creation.
Once ingredients start their journey to Rain Organica's workshop, we start tracking the greenhouse gas emissions involved in the production process.
I thought I'd take a few minutes to describe how Rain Organica's carbon emissions are calculated.
If you want to offset your own greenhouse gas emissions, stay tuned for several blog posts rolling out soon that tell you exactly how to do just that.
Once those posts are published, you can use any of the links below to access the series:
How to calculate the carbon footprint of your Amazon orders (coming soon)
Be sure you're signed up for the newsletter to be the first to know when these posts hit the site.
In the meantime, let's talk about skincare product creation.
Steps in the Skincare Product Creation Process
Every product delivered to your doorstep has its own life story.
That product's story has some common threads or steps (kind of like each and every one of us has common stories that are unique to each and every one of us:
- our birth
- our first word
- our school years
- landing our first job
- how we decided what we want to do with our life
- our adventures
and just like each of us, each product's story is ALWAYS unique.
I want to share with you the common threads in skincare product creation,
and, it starts with a seed
A crop is grown & the parts of the plant harvested (whether leaves, fruits, or seeds) at maturity.
The harvest is sorted to remove shells, hulls, leaf litter, debris,and other things.
Believe it or not, as a clean, small batch, sloooowwwww beauty (actually, not beauty, SKIN CARE) brand, many of our ingredients really are hand harvested and hand sorted.
After hand harvesting, the story diverges based on the ingredient. I'm going to finish out this particular story thread by sharing with you how cold pressed oils are made, specifically olive oil just because that is a fruit so many of us are familiar with and one that's so common in skincare & also in our diet.
- Olives are mashed until they look like olive pulp.
- The pulp is strained to separate the solid olive pieces from the oil.
- Once the oil is separated from the solids, it's bottled, labeled, and shipped to Rain Organica as a raw ingredient.
- When it arrives onsite, we use it to create the trail friendly products that you take with you on your explorations.
We start calculating the carbon footprint of that raw ingredient (in this example, certified organic cold pressed olive oil) when it ships from our supplier's door and starts its journey to Rain Organica's warehouse.
We consider how much energy we use during product creation, and that energy use is different based on whether the oil is used in a lotion or in a body oil, so we keep track of that too.
Once we've finished creating the beautiful trail friendly skincare products, our part's not quite done.
We also account for greenhouse gases emitted during shipping those green, clean skincare products from our workshop to your door.
While we stop tracking our product's carbon emissions once it arrives in your capable hands, that transition from us to you is just the beginning of the product's real adventures.
Carbon Offset 2020
If you want to read more about our carbon offsetting practices and find out how you can easily calculate and offset your own carbon emissions to achieve an even more eco friendly lifestyle, check out the posts below.
Sustainability Posts
The sustainability of glass | Just how eco-friendly is glass anyways?
And, if you want to find out more about purchasing carbon offsets (or just find out more about the programs we've supported for each ton of carbon Rain Organica has offset through our carbon neutrality program), click the links below.
Carbon Offset Projects for 2020
Carbon Offsetting Purchases through Gold Standard (stay tuned for some blog posts talking about each one of these offsets):
- Low Smoke Stoves in Darfur | Improving Energy Efficiency of Cook Stoves
- Carbon Emissions Reductions + Improved Energy Efficiency from PET Recycling
- Sidrap Wind Farm Project (Indonesia, renewable energy project)
- Terraclear | Providing Access to Clean Water for the People of Laos