Palm oil is an ingredient found in thousands of products- lipstick, anti-freeze, shampoo, potato chips, toothpaste, chocolate, industrial lubricants, instant noodles, margarine, crackers, dish detergent, cookies, biofuels, soups, and ice cream to name just a few. It’s an incredibly cheap and versatile oil, used as a frying oil, an emulsifying filler in products like chocolate and lipstick, and also as a foaming agent in soaps, detergents, and personal body care products. It’s aliases include sodium lauryl sulfate, laureth, and laurate.
The problem is it’s the largest cause of rainforest deforestation and habitat loss for critically endangered species in Southeast Asia, which include the Sumatran and Borneo orangutans, who share 96.4% of our genes! Rainforest is clear-cut to make room for these massive plantations, and in Indonesia alone, more than 2.8 million hectares of primary rainforest disappear each year.
And with the demand for cheap biofuels increasing, palm oil plantations are steadily on the rise, having increased at a rate of 120% over the last eight years, even though they may in fact be hindering climate change mitigation efforts instead of helping them. According to the Sumatran Orangutan Society, “When a hectare of primary rainforest is cleared and replaced with oil palms, this releases around 65 times as much carbon into the atmosphere as can be saved annually by using the palm oil as a biofuel.”
These large scale monoculture plantations require heavy pesticide use, and are completely unsustainable, often being completely abandoned after only 15-20 years when the trees begin to yield less palm kernel fruit. The SOS reports that these plantations also contribute significantly to the world greenhouse gas emissions: “Up to 15% of all global CO2 emissions come from Indonesia’s peat fires. Satellite images have shown that 75% of the fire hotspots are on plantation land, which largely grow palm oil.”
What’s most interesting is that environmental NGOs do not suggest boycotting palm oil altogether, mainly because they fear that companies will turn to an oil like soybean instead, which has a very similar story in terms of habitat loss in South America. Instead, they suggest contacting companies, and demanding a sustainable source of palm oil- one that doesn’t cause mass deforestation, habitat loss for critically endangered species, and human rights travesties. And this does already exist! Many small scale, fair trade community cooperatives are growing palm oil in a sustainable manner, boosting the local economy, and ensuring that the environment and human rights are not compromised.
If you want to cut palm oil out of your life completely, it is possible to do so without having to support soybean oil – look for coconut oil-derived foaming agents in your toothpaste, shampoo, soaps, and cleaning products instead.
For more information on palm oil, check out these links and reports:
Oil for Ape Scandal
Greasy Palms
The Sumatran Orangutan Society
WALHI – Friends of the Earth Indonesia’s forests campaign
Greenpeace’s palm oil campaign
Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil
Films4Conservation’s page on palm oil
Photo: Children in an Indonesian school learning about orangutan conservation and the impact of palm oil on the species.
