Walk down the cleaning aisle and “plant-based” appears on plenty of labels. But what’s the fuss about, and does it change anything that matters? To find out, let’s go back to where a cleaning ingredient begins.
What does “plant-based” mean?
It describes where an ingredient’s starting material comes from. A plant-based (or plant-derived) ingredient is made from plant sources such as coconut oil or plant sugars. A non-plant-based ingredient starts with petrochemicals, which come from crude oil.
Almost every cleaning ingredient, plant-based or not, is processed in a factory before it reaches the bottle. So the real difference is the source of the raw material, not whether the final ingredient is “natural.” On our labels, an asterisk marks the ingredients that are plant-derived, so you can see at a glance what’s what.
Two very different starting points
Petrochemical ingredients start with oil, a finite resource that formed over millions of years and is pumped from deep underground. Extracting and refining it releases carbon that had been locked away for all that time back into the atmosphere.
Plants work the other way around. As they grow, they draw carbon dioxide out of the air and release oxygen. So the carbon in a plant-derived ingredient was captured from the air only recently, not dug up from ancient reserves. And once a crop is harvested, it can be grown again, season after season, rather than taking millions of years to replace.
Think of it as borrowing carbon that’s already in circulation, rather than digging up carbon that was stored away long ago. Growing, harvesting and processing plants still takes energy and land, so plant-derived doesn’t mean carbon-free but it is a renewable starting point.
Is the chemistry different?
Often, no. Many ingredients are the same molecule whichever source they come from. Sodium laureth sulfate (SLES) can be made from petrochemicals or from plant oils, and it cleans the same way. The molecule doesn’t know where it came from. What changes is the starting material, which for plant-derived versions is renewable rather than fossil.
That’s also why plant-based doesn’t mean less effective. Cleaning power comes from the structure of the molecule and how well the formula is put together, not from whether the starting material was a plant or a barrel of oil.
What happens after it goes down the drain?
Whatever’s in your cleaning product eventually heads down the drain, through wastewater treatment and out into waterways, oceans and soil. The SLES we use are plant-derived and readily biodegradable according to Australian Standard AS4351. We unpack what that means in our post on why cleaning products should be biodegradable.
Where this leaves us
A renewable starting point doesn’t make a product perfect, and safety, performance and transparency matter too. But it’s a better place to begin, and it’s why we choose plant-derived ingredients wherever they perform.
Want to know more about any ingredient in our products? Our customer service team is happy to help at enq@naturesorganics.com.au.