Is palm oil the new plastic?
As one supermarket boss pledges to stop using the environmentally harmful palm oil, Joe Shute asks, should you too?
Last November the managing director of British supermarket chain Iceland made a visit to the Kalimantan rainforests in Borneo. Richard Walker, whose parents founded the frozen food firm in 1970, says he wanted to see the impact of the palm oil industry at first hand.
The 37-year-old recalls encountering a “horizon to horizon monoculture” of palm trees where pristine rainforest once stood. Illegal deforestation and draining of peat bogs were further expanding the plantations, which manufacture an oil now used in a staggering 50per cent of all supermarket products, from the cereal to the soap aisle.
Walker’s conclusion was stark: “I do not believe such a thing as sustainable palm oil exists.”
Following that trip, Iceland has now announced it will be removing palm oil from all of its own-brand products by the end of 2018 (replacing it with other vegetable oils). It is a move which will cost the company around £5million but Walker insists it is the right one.
Much like plastics – on which Iceland also took the lead among British supermarkets earlier this year, pledging that its own-branded products would be plastic-free by 2023 – a utilitarian substance has now turned into a global scourge.
And Walker, backed by high profile campaigners such as BBC presenter Chris Packham, says there is a moral imperative to act: “We have this great oil which is being used and abused and put into everything, and it is just not right.”
Iceland may seem an unlikely supermarket to lead the way on palm oils. Its reliance on processed foods (of which they are an all-pervasive constituent) resulted in it being named and shamed in a survey by the environmental charity Rainforest Foundation UK for its use of palm oils.
According to Walker, however, once informed about palm oil and its effects on the environment, 85per cent of its customers supported a decision to remove palm oils altogether.
“Five years ago, only Waitrose customers could afford to care about the environment,” he says. Now everyone is interested.
But how can we all reduce our reliance on palm oil, 62million tons of which were consumed globally in 2015 – a figure set to double by 2050? Everyday items from biscuits and bread to shampoo and washing detergents rely on vast amounts of palm oil, of which the EU is the world’s third biggest consumer.
Palm trees are native to the forests of West and Central Africa where indigenous communities have relied upon the oil for food, medicine and manufacturing products for centuries, but use has exploded in recent decades as the lubricant of the global production chain.
Swathes of rainforest amassing some 15-25million acres (6-10million hectares) have been cleared across south-east Asia to accommodate vast plantations. Such sustained habitat loss has had disastrous impacts on animal populations – orang-utans and Sumatran rhinos, elephants and tigers, which rely on the habitats being destroyed by palm oil plantations, are now listed as critically endangered.
Indonesia and Malaysia, which produce more than 85per cent of the world’s palm oil, are the only remaining home to wild orang-utans, of which fewer than 80,000 survive today.
This impact on biodiversity has been exacerbated by the draining and burning of peat bogs upon which the rainforest stands, releasing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
“It is a double whammy effect,” says Simon Counsell, director of Rainforest Foundation UK. “Essentially pretty much any wildlife living in the forest will have lost their habitat under these carpets of palm oil plantations.”
An association of industry and NGO members has been working together since 2004 under the auspices of a “Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil” (RSPO) to improve the sustainability of palm oil production. However, critics claim this has done little to halt the environmental destruction. And while there is now a legal requirement to display palm oil in products, the abundance and myriad uses for the ingredient means it can often be obscured under as many as 200 different names; palm kernel oil, palm fruit oil, hydrogenated palm glycerides, sodium kernelate and Elaeis guineensis are some of many examples.
“The problem is there are many derivatives of palm oil,” says Counsell. “It’s become a highly pervasive ingredient. Very often it’s impossible to recognise which products it is in.”