Our People Care, Earth Care & Fair Share Buying Goals

At Lush we pride ourselves on our creativity, and this doesn’t stop with our products. Since the beginning our aim has been to use the best, safest and most beautiful ingredients.

Written by: Lush Buying Team, and Charlotte Mitchell-Crofts - Buying & Compliance Coordinator
Updated: May 2026
Read time: 6 minutes

Over our 30 something years buying ingredients and packaging for cosmetics, we’ve learned that the best materials require a hands-on approach, which is why our Buying Team works tirelessly to source them directly, from the grower, farm or manufacturer, wherever possible. Often this involves a great deal of creative thinking and finding solutions to problems that come alongside some of our sourcing, which can include the finest essential oils and absolutes, the best natural raw materials, safe synthetics, 100% recycled packaging or removing palm oil from our products.

Lush has a strong connection to the communities and areas from which we buy our ingredients. We are committed to responsibly sourcing and buying our ingredients in a way that safeguards both the environment and the communities we partner with. By understanding how our buying affects people and the planet, we make responsible decisions about where, how, and from whom we source our ingredients and packaging. We support Fair Trade and Community Trade initiatives and you can find out more about our policy on Fair Trade here.

Ethical considerations when buying:

Workers rights

We must consider our suppliers behaviours regarding unions, collective bargaining, health & safety, and employees right to freedom to leave, fair pay, working hours, discrimination and no child labour, among many other considerations that can be found in our People Care, Earth Care & Fair Share Buying Policy.

Environmental Practices

During the different stages of a supplier relationship, we engage with some of our suppliers on topics around the use of agri-chemicals, whether they undertake any sustainability initiatives, how we can help replenish local ecosystems, reducing or avoiding production emissions into surrounding land and water, mindfulness around energy resource use and overall reduction of fossil fuels and prohibiting the use of Genetically Modified Organisms. We also collect information on the distance our ingredients travel via road, rail, sea and air so we can measure the environmental impact from freighting all of our raw materials and packaging around the world.

Animal Protection

All suppliers must adhere to our Non-Animal Testing Policy, which states that no supplier of ingredients or packaging should be testing on animals for any of their product catalogue for any reason, except for the unavoidable exception of REACH Legislation. You can read more about our policy here. We also cover animal welfare in our People Care, Earth Care and Fair Share Buying Policy, which can be found here.

Some examples of our creative buying:

• Our supply of dark patchouli is the result of a partnership that began over a decade ago and it helps to protect the primary forests of Sumatra and the endangered Orangutan population that depends on this ecosystem.
• One of our suppliers of frankincense oil uses a blockchain-enabled traceability app to bring transparency to the supply chain. Every batch of resin can be tracked back to its specific source, the movement of goods traced and payments logged in real time. The platform can also capture tree health and carbon data, building an increasingly complete picture of the supply chain over time.
• Our organic alcohol (ethanol) is produced from Brazilian sugarcane. It is grown in a way that enhances biodiversity and it is processed through a fully circular system. This approach not only creates a carbon-neutral production process but also supports thriving ecosystems, with over 340 species recorded on the farms.
• Our benzoin resin is carefully hand-collected and processed by 300 local tappers in Northern Laos, who are supported by our supplier through training, fair working practices, and farming methods that protect biodiversity and healthy forest ecosystems.
• We buy unrefined shea butter handcrafted by a collective of more than 400 women in the Upper East region of Ghana.
• In the UK, we buy over 2 tonnes of cucumbers a year and over 5 tonnes of fresh lemon, using both the juice and the peel to reduce as much waste as we can.
• Our cocoa butter and powder is made from Fair Trade and Organic cocoa beans from small agroforestry holders in Sierra Leone, Dominican Republic and Peru.
• Our illipe butter is made from nuts collected by indigenous communities in Borneo, providing them with a sustainable source of income while helping to maintain and protect the rainforest.
• The bulk of our sandalwood supply is from West Timor, a Lush collaborative project primarily focused on replanting trees into the ecosystem where Sandalwood oil is produced, as it is a natural habitat of the Komodo dragon. This project was started alongside Wahli and Green Justice Indonesia with a first nursery in Sumba in 2021. The latest 2025-2026 recorded figures show that for every 1kg of oil produced, 38 trees were planted - a ratio that our supplier is working towards improving year on year.
• When the season allows, our herbs, berries, charcoal powder, cucumbers and asparagus come from suppliers within 40km of our manufacturing site in Poole. They are added fresh to products being made in the UK. Our other markets also aim to buy fresh and organic herbs, berries and citrus fruits when the season allows.
• To minimise environmental impact, we try to fit out our shops with as many natural, circular or recycled materials as possible. For example, the worktops in our Glasgow shop are made from over 690,000 recycled yoghurt pots!

Child labour stance

We are aligned with the ILO standards on child labour. We believe the minimum working age should not be lower than the age for completing compulsory education locally. We insist that our suppliers do not engage in any employment of child labour. Should suppliers become aware of any child labour taking place, we would expect them to engage with Lush and with their supply chain in supporting a training and transition programme to support the child back into education.

In line with the Definition of Child Labour established under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, we define a child as anyone under 18. Child labour refers to work that: 

• Deprives children of childhood, potential, and dignity.
• Harms physical and mental development.
• Interferes with compulsory schooling
• hazardous conditions (minimum age 18 for hazardous work). 

We do recognise that not all children’s participation in agriculture constitutes child labour. Age-appropriate, non-hazardous tasks that don’t interfere with schooling can be part of normal rural development and intergenerational skill transfer.

Suppliers we support

For many years we have been buying directly from producers wherever possible to ensure we understand the full journey of our ingredients. By visiting as many of our suppliers as we can in person, our buyers are able to gain an unfiltered view of how our materials are produced. These direct relationships allow us to understand and address social and environmental risks while gaining deep insight into the natural factors (like climate and seasonality) that affect the availability, quality and cost of what we buy.

Purchasing our materials in this way helps us to foster honest, long-term relationships with our suppliers, and helps to minimise supply disruptions of quality materials used to make our products. We are able to ensure our suppliers understand the needs of our business and we also understand the needs and constraints of theirs.

Direct buying has enabled us to support and help finance some really worthwhile and forward-thinking projects worldwide that make us proud. For example, our work with Oho Niha Oil in FY2024 helped our supplier to implement an Internal Control Systems based Organic Coconut Plantation Practice on Nias Island in Sumatra Indonesia. This collaboration involved 100 local coconut farmers who supply coconuts to Ono Niha for virgin coconut oil production, which is then bought by Lush to use in some of our products. It was noted by the farmers that they are facing declining coconut yields, and that due to an aging tree population, it was only going to get worse. The project aimed to raise local awareness on sustainable coconut farming practices, and prepare them for the future.

Our work is a careful balancing act: being present on the ground with our suppliers whilst also supporting the other day to day operations of Lush. Beyond sourcing, our Buying Team is dedicated to: 

• Telling the stories of our suppliers. By creating resources that bring our ingredients and the people behind them to life, we are connecting our staff and customers to the origins of these ingredients and the people that produce them.
• Strengthening our supply chain resilience by navigating global logistics to ensure your favourite products are consistent in quality and always available on the shelf.
• Ethical financial management by managing costs with integrity to cultivate lasting, productive and mutually beneficial partnerships with our suppliers.
• Strategic improvement by identifying and prioritising our highest-impact ingredients, collaborating with specialists and our expert teams to drive meaningful quality and sustainability enhancements.

We believe in regeneration

We believe that the way we source materials has an ability to protect, regenerate and restore our planet and communities. Our greater vision, that our buying teams are constantly working towards, is for our supply network to be a force for growth and diversity, integrating rewilding principles with human-centric development. We know that these times we are operating in call for a fundamental commitment to people and planet and our goal is simple (yet ambitious): to ensure our sourcing decisions prioritise restoration, allowing us to contribute more to the earth than we take - leaving the world lusher than we found it.