The Myth of “Green” Cleaning: Why Ecover, Method, and Truly Free Still Rely on Palm & Petrochemicals

 For years, we’ve been told that the solution to toxic cleaners was simple: just “go green.” Swap the bottle, switch the label, choose plant-based instead of chemical. But behind the soft pastels and feel-good branding is a brutal truth most consumers never see: “green” cleaners are still built on the same extractive supply chains destroying rainforests and wiping out endangered species at staggering speed.

“Green” Labels, Same Old Chemistry

Brands like Method, Ecover, Truly Free, Seventh Generation, and Mrs. Meyer’s market themselves as the ethical alternative — but the base chemistry hasn’t meaningfully changed. Instead of petroleum-derived surfactants, they simply shifted to palm or coconut-derived surfactants.

It sounds harmless until you trace where those oils come from: former rainforest floor, carved into single-crop plantations replacing some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth. “Plant-based” does not mean gentle — not for wildlife, not for forests, not for the humans breathing the haze when those forests burn.

The Hidden Cost of Palm & Coconut

Up to 300 football fields of rainforest are destroyed every day in Indonesia and Southeast Asia to make way for palm plantations. These are not empty fields — they are the last remaining habitat for Sumatran tigers, orangutans, and rhinos struggling to survive.

When companies scale “green” cleaners, they scale rainforest loss with them.

● The Sumatran tiger: barely 400 left in the wild.

● The Bornean orangutan: 100,000 gone in just 16 years.

● The Sumatran rhino: fewer than 80 remain worldwide.

Every bottle of “eco” cleaner built on palm or coconut surfactants rests on what used to be living rainforest, breathing carbon sink, and home.

This isn’t sustainability — it’s relocation of the harm.

Why These Brands Can Still Call Themselves “Eco”

Because in the United States, terms like “plant-based,” “biodegradable,” and “non-toxic” carry no legal definition. There is no oversight, no regulation, and no accountability. If the chemical originated from a plant at any point — even if it was cracked, refined, bleached, stripped, alkylated, and industrially synthesized along the way — companies can still call it “natural.”

Consumers think they are helping. The shelves tell them they are. But the rainforest tells a different story.

There Is a Way Out

If the goal is truly harmless cleaning, then the solution can’t come from plantation crops that replace forests — it must come from a system that never required deforestation in the first place.

There is a way to clean your home without destroying someone else’s.

Meet Motherferment: a palm-free, coconut-free cleaning system built on fermentation not extraction.