Beyond the Invoice: What Does Sustainable Product Development Actually Cost?
Not long before this workshop, the women of the Sinergi Mekarsari Lestari cooperative made a soap that did not pass. They had turned tamanu oil, one of the coastal forest's main yields, into bars, which was the right instinct. The problem was the formula. It used SLS, a common foaming agent, and it failed the environmental curation set by Women's Earth Alliance. The soap worked. The ingredients did not.
A cooperative could treat that as a dead end. This one treated it as a starting point. The rejected soap became the reason for a training in sustainable product development, and the question it raised- what a product actually costs- ran through everything that followed.
Learning by doing, in groups
About 25 women took part, split into small groups so that everyone had their hands in the work rather than watching one person demonstrate. The approach was learning by doing. Participants moved through preparing and weighing ingredients, mixing, the stages of making the soap, molding, storage, and evaluating the result. Nobody left having only heard about the process.
The point of running it this way is not just efficiency. When a group of women each make a batch themselves, the knowledge sits with all of them, not with a single trained member who then becomes a bottleneck. It is the same reason the cooperative's cookie production standardized in the first place.
The thirty-day wait
One lesson from the soap is that you cannot judge it when it is finished. A fresh bar is not a final product. Tamanu soap needs to cure for around 30 days before you can assess its quality, and only then can you see whether it has the texture and green color a good tamanu-oil soap should have.
That wait teaches something a recipe cannot. Making a product is not the same as finishing one. Curing asks for patience and observation before anyone decides the batch is worth developing further, and it builds a habit of evaluating rather than assuming.
From fish salt to bath salt
Alongside the soap, the women made bath salt, and the raw material is the detail worth remembering. They used local salt, the same salt that fishing families in the area have long used to preserve fish. Mixed with essential oils and blended for scent, that everyday preservative became a body-care product.
This is local resource innovation at its plainest. Nothing exotic was brought in. A material already sitting in the community, with an old and practical use, was given a new one and a higher value. Participants worked through selecting and preparing the salt, mixing, using essential oils, adjusting aroma, and thinking about how such a product might be developed and sold.
What a product actually costs
The part of the workshop that reframed the rest was about cost. Using an Economic Toolkit introduced by WEA, participants learned to calculate cost of goods, the HPP, before setting a price. They broke down raw materials, additives, essential oils, packaging, labor, and other production costs, which is standard business literacy and useful on its own.
Then the training went one step further, and this is the idea worth carrying beyond Karangduwur. A product can look cheap when you only count what the producer pays for it. If making it creates waste, or relies on materials that harm the environment, there is an environmental cost that no invoice captures but somebody eventually pays. Participants were asked to trace the whole line: the material chosen, the way it is produced, the cost, the environmental impact, and finally the price and whether the business can last.
That connected directly back to the SLS soap. A cheaper foaming agent had looked like the sensible choice until its real cost showed up at curation. Seen this way, choosing an ingredient stops being a purely technical decision. It is an economic and an environmental one at the same time.
Women moving up the value chain
Underneath the soap and the salt is a shift in what these women do. For a long time, their role in the tamanu economy was to gather and supply raw material. In this workshop they were formulating products, weighing and mixing, calculating costs, and judging quality. That is a different position in the value chain, and a more durable one, because the value added no longer leaves the village with the raw seed.
What is still unfinished
None of this is a finished product line yet, and the cooperative is clear about that. The soap formula still needs refining. Quality has to be made consistent, and each batch evaluated after curing. The bath salt needs a settled scent formula. HPP has to be calculated the same way every time, and prices set to give a fair margin. Beyond that sit packaging, product testing, and the legal requirements that come before selling more widely. These are the honest next steps, not footnotes.
Who ran it
Balwana Bumi Lestari Foundation is a women-led foundation in Karangduwur, Kebumen, Central Java, established in May 2025 and working alongside Women's Earth Alliance to support women's economic empowerment through forest-based enterprise. The tamanu soap and bath salt work is one part of that, developed with the women of Koperasi Sinergi Mekarsari Lestari.
If you support community enterprise or sustainable production, the next stage of this work is where partnership lands well. You can read more about the women behind it on our impact page.
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