Eight Acres - Our Ethics
Natural
At Eight Acres it is important for us to use to use natural ingredients. We don't use any artificial fragrance oils or colours in our soaps. We only use high quality essential oils, and any colours come from edible (or harmless) ingredients such as herbs, charcoal, clay, beer and honey.
We don’t use any synthetic chemicals like sodium laurel sulphate (SLS) or parabens.
In our beekeeping, we don’t use any pesticides in the hives, choosing only natural methods to control small hive beetle. We also don’t treat our hive boxes with naphthalene, using only high-quality paint to seal our boxes. Our honey is raw and filtered only, it is not heat-treated.
We want to help you to reduce your exposure to toxic chemicals, by offering more natural alternatives.
Handmade
Most of our products are made by hand in Kumbia, QLD. We make all the soap and beeswax products. We extract the honey from hives on our property. I do buy a small range of products to sell that complement the handmade products and help you to use them – such as soap dishes and soap shakers.
When you buy from us you are supporting a small family business in rural Australia! All our products are made in small batches, they are unique and crafted by hand so that you can avoid mass production.
Sustainable
Sustainability is about reducing the resources that we use and the waste that we produce. We strive to reduce our packaging and use only compostable materials. We use beef tallow to make soap – this is a by-product of meat production and would otherwise be a waste product (lucky for us it makes fantastic soap!). We keep our hives on our property so that the we don’t have to drive long distances using lots of fuel to move them around.
Our soap is also palm oil free (one of the benefits of tallow is that it makes a good substitute for palm oil), as its very difficult to source truly ethical palm oil. None of our products are tested on animals.
We are here to help you live more sustainably too! Through our blog posts and ebooks you can learn more about producing your own food. And through my products you can reduce you plastic waste (shampoo bars and beeswax wraps are a great place to start!).