I suppose I'm asking why Palm over coconut or cocoa butter? I know there's issues with the supply of those also, but the scale of the palm oil environmental problems right now far outweighs those. I mainly make coconut/olive oil soap and its just lovely, why is palm still the first choice?
Comparing palm to coconut where soap is concerned is kinda like comparing salt to sugar in a way. While both resemble each other in some ways, they are very different from each other in other ways.......
Both make a hard, white bar, but compared to coconut, palm does not make much in the way of delightful, super fluffy bubbles, but where it lacks in super fluffy bubbles, it makes up for in long-lastingness because of it's unique fatty acid makeup being high in palmitic acid which is less soluble than other fatty acids.
Coconut, on the other hand makes a super bubbly lathering soap, but because of its unique fatty acid makeup, it will not last anywhere near as long as a palm-based soap and it will also be extremely more cleansing than a palm-based bar. The two just do not make good subs for each other at all in soap.
You're getting closer to the right track with cocoa butter (hard, less soluble, no fluffy bubbles), but there are still too many differences to be able to sub it 1:1 for palm: For example, it's much higher in palmitic and stearic acids than palm, which among other issues can lead to brittle soap if subbed 1:1 for palm, not to mention that cocoa butter has its own supply issues that make it way more expensive than palm.
As Shari and Atiz mentioned, lard and/or tallow make great substitutes for palm (a combo of something like 75% lard/25% tallow being closer to palm's fatty acid profile than using one or the other individually).
For a veggie based combo of oils/butters whose fatty acid profile for all intents and purposes is near identical to the fatty acid makeup of palm, you can implement the below formulation in your recipe as a 1:1 stand-in for palm. For what it's worth, over in Zany's recently posted Basic Trinity thread, I gave a step by step explanation of how to actually calculate the below formula on SoapCalc in order to be able to incorporate it into one's recipe as a 1:1 replacement for palm:
Shea butter 45.5% / Cocoa Butter 43% / Sunflower Oil 10% / Coconut Oil 1.5%
Others are using soy wax as a palm replacement, but soy has its production issues as well.
Bottom line, palm-free soaps are certainly quite doable, but whether one chooses to use palm or not is a very personal decision based on many underlining, varying factors, as Battlegnome pointed out. We all have to pick our battles based on our situations and what we are each faced with.
IrishLass
