Green Daily

First, palm oil is in everything. Food, cosmetics, cleaning supplies. If you see any of these familiar looking names on the list of ingredients, it's really palm oil (visit this site for a more complete list):

• Palmate
• Palm Oil Kernal
• Palmitate
• Glyceryl Stearate
• Stearic Acid
• Steareth -2
• Steareth -20
• Sodium Lauryl Sulphate
• Sodium lauryl sulfoacetate (coconut and/or palm)
• Hydrated palm glycerides
• Cetyl palmitate and octyl palmitate (and anything with palmitate at the end)

Palm oil is also in demand as a feedstock for bio-fuel, if it's grown in a sustainable manner, because it's a relatively high yield crop.

Here's why it's a problem. Of the ocean of palm oil it takes to fill the supermarkets of the world, about 80% is produced in a small corner of Southeast Asia: Indonesia and Malaysia, in a decidedly non-sustainable manner.

Where there were once acres of rainforest and peatland sheltering endangered species like the Sumatran and Borneo orangutans, Sumatran Tiger, the Sumatran Rhinoceros, and the Asian elephant, there are now geometric squares filled with rows of palm oil trees.

Besides eliminating the habitats of these endangered creatures, replacing rainforests and peatland also releases huge quantities of greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change.

Sure, in theory palm oil could be produced in a sustainable manner. There is even a group called the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, which is supported by WWF. But the bottom line is that the demand for palm oil still exceeds the efforts to produce it in a sustainable way.

So what to do?

• Support companies like LUSH who put their money where their mouth is and remove palm oil from their products.
• Support the Nyaru Menteng Rehabilitation Center in Borneo, which cares for orangutans orphaned by deforestation
• If you have to buy something with palm oil in it, look for a product that carries certification that it was sustainably produced.