For those of you hearing the words palm oil for the first time, your mind might be drifting to an island with white beaches, azure waters, and green palms. But no, unfortunately, palm oil connotes something not nearly as serene and is merely a distant relative to the iconic palm tree.

Ok, so then, what is it?

Well, palm oil is something that is ubiquitous, so much so that it is in (on average) over 50 percent of items in any given super market. It comes from the fruit of the tropical oil palm plant and is in everything from baby food to cookies, from toothpaste to cup noodles. As it turns out, Amazingy readers, the category of products that contains the highest amount of palm oil is cosmetics. This edible vegetable oil can be found in shampoos, conditioners, body washes, liquid hand soaps, shower gels, shaving creams, lipsticks…OMG, shall I go on?

You might be wondering how you can know whether your fave cosmetics contain palm oil and I am here to tell you that it is a tricky endeavour indeed. Palm oil is super sly in that it has many aliases it goes by. What I mean is that companies are not legally obligated to list palm oil as, well, palm oil. It can go by nicknames such as vegetable oil, palmate, palmolein, palm stearin, sodium lauryl sulfate, cetyl alcohol. And that’s just the short list—from my digging I found over 25 names that palm oil can be cast under in an ingredient list. So, yeah, it’s kind of hard to pin down.

You should be concerned about palm oil’s slippery pseudonyms because it is definitely something that you want to be careful about (or avoid) purchasing in not only cosmetics but also in food items. That is, only if you consider yourself to be an ethical consumer—an admirable intention I think we can all agree. The reason for this is that palm oil, as it is produced now, has a quite tarnished reputation. It’s infamous qualities range from increasing global warming to the destruction of precious rainforests, to bringing endangered animals to near extinction. In order to give you a more informed perspective, I’ll start by giving you a little background and taking you through its production, impact, and finally, potential solutions.

A Little Background on Palm Oil

Palm oil has long been used as a cooking oil in African countries and is also widely used in Brazil. However, it’s only in the past few decades that it has experienced such a surge in popularity on a global scale. It owes its rising fame to the ability to meet consumer demands and to its cheap price in comparison to other plant oils. At this point, the oil is ingrained in the supply chain and the increased demand for palm oil is no small matter. Between 1982 and 2008, the global production of palm oil increased from around 2.4 million tonnes to a staggering 48 million tonnes, and the scary truth is that the demand is expected to double by 2050. The industry is huge, currently estimated to be worth at least 44 billion US dollars a year, and at this rate is only getting bigger.

Where & How It’s Produced

The oil palm plant is native to rainforests and is originally from Africa. Today, palm oil is cultivated in Africa, Asia, North America and South America….so almost everywhere. However, it is predominantly produced in Malaysia and Indonesia with 85 percent of all globally produced palm oil coming from these regions. Both are home to some of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in the world.

Palm oil plantations are produced using the slash and burn method, which is arguably the easiest way to clear land. It is practiced by clearing away vegetation from previously untouched rainforest and setting fire to what’s left. If land was cleared by simply cutting down vegetation, one hectare of land could produce 500 tonnes of biomass. Without the burning stage, farmers would be left to wait 3 years until the land became usable and that’d be awfully inconvenient, don’t you think? After being planted, oil palms tend to yield fruit in about 4 to 6 years.

Why the Production of Palm Oil is Bad

FOR SO MANY REASONS it’s unbelievable.

First of all, palm oil has become one of the largest sources for deforestation worldwide. The unmonitored expansion keeps on demolishing and destroying some of the world’s most diverse (both culturally and biologically) ecosystems. Remember how I said that 85 percent of palm oil comes from Indonesia and Malaysia? Well, in 15 years it is predicted that 98 percent of their rainforests will be all but disappeared as a result of deforestation. The World Wildlife Fund has estimated that 300 football fields worth of rainforest are cleared every hour.

Where will all of the animals live without the rainforests? Well, that’s the thing, they probably won’t. Among the most at risk are the sumatran rhino and the orangutan, which are both on the brink of extinction in Indonesia. They’re not the only ones though—tigers and elephants are suffering from the impact of habitat loss as well. But, still, that’s not all, oil palm plantations have a devastating impact not only on animals but also on some of the most biodiverse plant species.

Also causing problems: the impact of the slash and burn method and deforestation on increased greenhouse gas emissions. Indonesia, the location of the largest production of palm oil, is also one of the world’s largest producers of carbon emissions held responsible for global warming. Palm oil production is one of the human activities serving as a major contributor to climate change. The carbon-rich peat land that is cleared and then burned for plantations releases vast measures of carbon pollution into the atmosphere. There’s an elegantly simple way of looking at this: forests are sponges that absorb green house gases, thus burning those same forests will release those green house gases into the air.

Sustainable Solutions

Some people will remain steadfastly convinced that palm oil is absent in a greener envisioning of the future, while others believe that adhering to strict guidelines and transparency can lead to sustainable palm oil production.

There have been some attempts to achieve the latter. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has been doing a lot of work towards reaching this end. Founded in 2004, this organization works on, as they state, “transforming the palm oil industry in collaboration with the global supply chain, to put it on a sustainable path.” Their main achievement has been developing a set of environmental and social demands with which companies must meet in order to gain the certifiably sustainable stamp of approval. They have a holistic method that approaches the palm oil industry at seven different stages within its progression, carrying it from production to consumption.

Still, it’s arguable that the RSPO must hold companies to even stricter standards of compliance. As it stands now, the RSPO only prohibits the destruction of “high conservation value” land, a term that has yet to be internationally defined and that blurs the lines of what is actually protected. What’s more, RSPO certified plantations have been found to be slashing and burning the dangerous carbon-emitting peat lands, a practice supposedly eradicated under the terms of the organization. Without the omission of this destructive method and more clarification of what conservation land is, their standards could be merely written off as “greenwashing”. What I mean by that term is that certain certification standards can brainwash consumers, giving them a false sense of ethical security in purchasing habits, while the real epic environmental destruction continues in the background.

It’s so important that countries sacrificing their precious rainforests (and our precious world) for short-term economic gain are put to a stop. That being said, it’s debatable whether the production of palm oil should be brought to a halt completely. Palm oil production has the ability to lift regions and individuals out of severe poverty, producing a profit of about $3,000 USD/hectare compared to $100USD/hectare with conventional agriculture. There could be hope found in a compromise of companies abiding by the RSPO certification standards in a stricter sense, where slash and burn methods are truly put to a stop, conservation land is never used (and is allowed to regrow), and the ethical production of palm oil still manages to raise communities out of impoverishment.

I would tell you to only buy products that you knew were produced from sustainable palm oil, or to avoid it completely, but in truth, the best thing you can do is to avoid processed foods or mass-produced cosmetics as much as is feasible for you. Instead, try to buy fresh local produce and patronize sustainably minded cosmetic companies. The number one important thing to do is to educate yourself on what it is exactly you’re consuming. The unfortunate truth is that if it’s not palm oil, it’s something else, so we must always be mindful in our consumption. And don’t forget to tell your loved ones all about the palm oil crisis, and quickly.

Sources:

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/ng-interactive/2014/nov/10/palm-oil-rainforest-cupboard-interactive
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-23026219
http://www.rspo.org/
https://drpongo.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/productpalmoillist2012flexweek.pdf
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/palm_oil/
https://www.rainforest-rescue.org/topics/palm-oil