EAST GARAFRAXA, Ontario (AP) — Julie Thurgood-Burnett had no idea that her inspiration during the COVID-19 lockdown to plant a lavender field on her husband’s family farm outside Toronto would turn into a small business. She had never been a farmer, but soon she had a bright purple field and a new hobby: making lavender oil for her friends and family, which they liked so much she ran out of oil.

And then she had a brand, Hereward Farms, that she wanted to make “authentically sustainable.” For her, that meant avoiding plastic packaging, even if that would have been cheaper. It also meant sourcing as many raw materials as possible from Canada, which turned out to be much harder than she expected. She was able to get Canadian-made beeswax and sunflower oil and work with a Canadian supplier, but not everything comes from Canada. Most of Hereward’s essential oils and all of its dried flowers (except lavender, of course) come from the United States.

“When you try to figure out where things came from, you go into this dark hole,” she said.

It’s a challenge for small brands with eco-friendly values, because the multi-billion dollar beauty industry, dominated by a few big brands, has an uglier underbelly. According to supply chain experts, it’s nearly impossible to trace some ingredients back to their source. The manufacturing and disposal of cosmetics contributes to the carbon emissions, deforestation, pollution and waste production that are warming the planet. Climate change, in turn, is exacerbating extreme weather events like heat, drought and floods that are disrupting production. And in many countries, there are few regulations on beauty products. But despite the uphill battle, many business owners who care about being eco-friendly are trying their best to address these issues.

Consumers are increasingly demanding sustainability and transparency from their favorite multi-step skincare routines and seeking what is commonly referred to as “clean beauty.” Yet dubious claims about “green” and “clean” products abound.

Dale Rogers, a professor at Arizona State University’s business school who studies supply chains, gave the example of “sustainable” palm oil, an ingredient often found in eco-friendly cosmetic brands. “There are sustainability certification groups that certify ingredients. So palm oil, for example, may be sustainably produced, but then it gets mixed in with other palm oils and you lose track,” he said.

“Very few” major cosmetics companies do the research needed to actually know where their materials come from, says Bindiya Vakil, CEO and founder of Resilinc, a company that maps supply chains for companies. And Vakil says even when major companies are willing to support efforts to trace ingredients back to their origins, suppliers aren’t always willing to answer those questions. Investigators can then turn to publicly available information to try to fill in the gaps, but it’s not perfect.

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And “brands are constantly changing suppliers,” says Homer Swei, senior vice president of healthy living and consumer safety science at the Environmental Working Group, which offers third-party certification for beauty products focused on human health. “So even if you spend a billion dollars defining the supply chain today, tomorrow it will look different and be outdated.”

In some countries, laws can crack down on companies, prohibiting them from sourcing from suppliers that use forced labor or harmful chemicals, for example. But environmental regulations are lagging behind, and profit motives and promises of sustainable brand claims “prevent greater disclosure,” says Vakil.

Any third party can create their own certification or sustainability initiative, including cosmetics companies themselves. The Estée Lauder Companies is a founding member of an initiative called the Traceability Alliance for Sustainable Cosmetics, according to Meghan Ryan, its executive director of responsible sourcing. It is not a certification, but rather requires suppliers to voluntarily provide information about their production, and “uses a variety of tools to do due diligence,” she said in a statement.

Major cosmetics retailers Sephora and Ulta Beauty label certain products with the “Planet Aware” and “Conscious Beauty” labels, respectively. However, when asked by the Associated Press, neither company would answer questions about why certain criteria were chosen for these labels, how many of their total product offerings receive these labels, and whether they plan to increase the number of these types of products.

Swei said the best certifications on the market are fully transparent ones, but added that “climate change is changing supply chains around the world,” making full transparency difficult. Vakil agreed that extreme weather events caused by climate change are increasingly disruptive to businesses, especially those that rely on agricultural commodities that are vulnerable to heat, drought, flooding and damage from hurricanes and wildfires.

Many small brand owners are motivated to be more transparent and selective about their ingredients, but some report spending hours tracking ingredient origins, switching manufacturers, and accepting lower profit margins. And entrepreneurs just starting out sometimes don’t know what questions to ask their suppliers or don’t have enough clout to demand answers.

Rina Clarke founded the Buck Naked Soap Company when her young son developed a skin reaction to conventional cosmetics. She said she was “constantly disappointed” when she found she couldn’t make soaps with certain sought-after scents, such as sandalwood and strawberry, because she was convinced it was impossible due to her company’s set sustainability and health standards. Many sandalwood species, for example, have been over-harvested and some are now threatened with extinction.

“As much as I want us to be competitive as a company with other companies, it’s hard,” she said. “We don’t want to be hypocrites, that’s basically what it comes down to.”

Charlie Razook, founder of men’s skincare line Jackfir, said the brand took a particularly long time to launch because he spent several years obtaining third-party certifications, including the Environmental Working Group, and reworking his products’ formulas to meet his health and sustainability goals. But he had to abandon his original intention to sell everything in glass containers instead of plastic because, manufacturing constraints aside, men simply “like tubes.”

Clarke also said it was difficult for environmentally conscious brands not to scare some customers away from their products. “Sustainability often costs money,” she said.

The odds are stacked against their goals in many ways, but small business owners like Razook, Clarke and Thurgood-Burnett keep trying. They say the extra effort is worth the frustration. They all described customers demanding transparency and sustainability and were happy to find brands willing to meet that demand.

And Thurgood-Burnett also derived personal satisfaction from this search.

“It’s such an intimate relationship because you’ve planted the plants in the ground and nurtured them,” she said of her lavender crop. “Sometimes I go out and just sit with the plants, and I love that the bees are there and we’re creating this really great ecosystem. That wasn’t why we started this, but that’s what it’s become.”

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In this story, a quote from Homer Swei has been corrected to read “to define the supply chain…” instead of “Have you found the supply chain…”

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Follow Melina Walling on X at @MelinaWalling. Follow Joshua A. Bickel on X and Instagram.

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