Why Palm Oil?
- evpp480
- Mar 2, 2017
- 2 min read
Palm oil is a vegetable oil that allows manufacturers to maintain a smooth and creamy consistency in their products without having the oil separate from the product, like natural peanut butter that requires stirring after the oil separates (1). Sounds awesome, right? No so fast.
Even though palm oil has great implications for manufacturers, it isn’t great for the planet, rainforests, animals, or humans.
Most palm oil comes from large plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. While these areas have traditionally been covered in thick rainforest, these rainforests are being removed at an unprecedented rate in order to make room for palm plantations (2).
Most of the rainforests that are being removed are being taken out with slash and burn. This practice involves chopping down all the plants and then burning them in order to completely clear the land as quickly as possible. This not only harms any animals that may still be in the area, but it also produces immense amounts of smoke which causes respiratory problems for people in the area and releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air which contributes to global warming (3).
This deforestation has led to a rapid decrease in habitat for orangutans, and in turn, major decline in the number of orangutans surviving in the wild. In 1990, there were 315,000 orangutans. Today, there are fewer than 50,000 left. Palm oil is not the only cause for decline in orangutan numbers; however, it has pushed them closer to extinction (2).
And if all of this wasn’t enough, the palm oil industry has been involved with land-grabbing from indigenous peoples (4), human rights violations (5), human trafficking (6), child labor (7), and slavery (8).
Through this blog and website, we hope to shed more light on the issues surrounding palm oil. Our hope is that more people will become aware of palm oil and be armed with the knowledge they need to make more sustainable choices in the things that they buy.
Check back in upcoming weeks for topics including: human rights violations in the palm industry, palm oil free snack foods, health and beauty products without palm oil, and more!
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