What Is Palm Oil & Can It Ever Be Sustainable?

Wondering what palm oil is exactly, and if it can ever be sustainable? I explore the complex issues with this oil and how we can help bring about change.

In the Western world, we’re unknowingly addicted to palm oil. Look in any cupboard in your home – from the kitchen to the bathroom and your cleaning cupboard and no doubt, you’ll find it.

It’s in the cleaning products we use to clean our homes. It’s in our health and beauty products – from shampoos and body washes to toothpaste and cosmetics. And it’s even in the food we buy, from biscuits and bread to chocolate spreads.

But what is palm oil exactly? How environmentally-friendly (or not) is it? And can it ever be sustainable? That’s the questions I’ve set out to answer for you today. Read on to uncover almost everything you need to know about this rather murky oil.

Table Of Contents

• What Is Palm Oil?
• What Is Palm Oil Used For?
• Why Is The Oil So Widely Used?
• How To Identify Palm Oil In The Products We Buy
• Issues Related To Growth & Production
• Is Sustainable Palm Oil Actually Sustainable?
• What Can We Do?

What Is Palm Oil?

Palm oil is a versatile vegetable oil derived from the fruit of oil palm trees, known scientifically as Elaeis guineensis.

These single-stemmed trees can grow up to 20 metres tall and have large distinctive fern-like leaves that can grow as much as 5 metres in length. Each tree produces flowers in dense clusters, which then develop into yellowish-red stoned fruits, similar in size to that of a plum.

Both the seed and the flesh of the fruit are rich in oil. The flesh is pulped to produce palm oil, an edible oil that’s solid at room temperature. Meanwhile, the seed can be crushed to produce palm kernel oil, used in foods and soap making. 

Oil palm trees are native to West and Southwest Africa. However, most of the oil that we consume in the West comes from Indonesia and Malaysia, with Indonesia alone supplying approximately 50% of the world’s supply. This is because oil palms were introduced to Indonesia by the Dutch in 1848, and then to Malaysia in 1910 by the British who wanted to capitalise on this important international commodity.

What Is Palm Oil Used For?

Once the oils are extracted from the fruit, it’s rarely used raw. Instead, the oils are chemically processed in many different ways to form what are known as derivatives of the oil.

These derivatives have a wide range of industrial and commercial applications. This includes:

• Food processing and manufacturing – including crisps, chocolate, ice cream, margarine, bread, biscuits and more.
• Cosmetics – including foundation, concealer, lipstick, mascara and eyeshadow.
• Health and beauty products – such as skincare and haircare products, including sunscreen, toothpaste, and perfume.
• Cleaning products – including soap and laundry detergent.
• Animal feed.
• Biofuels.

In fact, palm oil is the most widely consumed vegetable oil on the planet. Globally, we consume around 78 million metric tons of the stuff each year.

Why Is The Oil So Widely Used?

Wondering why we use so much of the stuff? The answer is simple – because it’s useful, cheap, high-yielding, and versatile. 

Manufacturers found that palm oil is the perfect alternative to more expensive and labour-intensive animal fats. And crucially, per hectare, it generates higher yields than many other vegetable oils. Oil palm trees can produce much more oil per unit of land area than most other oil-producing plants – nine times more than soy and almost five times more than rapeseed.

Palm oil is also incredibly useful. It helps give processed foods a longer shelf-life and is it’s stable at high temperatures. This means it helps to give fried products a crispy and crunchy texture. Plus it’s odourless and colourless so doesn’t alter the look or smell of food products. In health and beauty products, it cleanses and moisturises, and helps products work up a lather.

Simply put, it is cheap, plentiful and it does a job perfectly.

How To Identify Palm Oil In The Products We Buy

Because there are so many derivatives of palm oil, it can be listed on a product’s ingredient list in myriad ways. The Orangutan Foundation say there are over 200 names for the oil and its derivatives. Here are just some of them:

• Palm Fruit Oil
• Palmate
• Palm olein
• Palmitic Acid
• Palmitate
• Palm Kernel
• Palm Kernel Oil
• Hydrated Palm Glycerides
• Glyceryl
• Palm Stearine
• Stearic Acid
• Stearate
• Sodium Laureth Sulfate
• Sodium Lauryl Sulfate/Sodium Lauryl Sulphate
• Sodium Lauryl Lactylate
• Sodium Palm Kernelate
• Palmitoyl Oxostearamide
• Palmitoyl Tetrapeptide-3
• Palmitoyl Alcohol
• Calcium stearoyl lactylate
• Caprylic triglyceride

It might seem like an impossible task to identify it in the products you buy. However, there is a trick to have up your sleeve.

If you look at the list above, you’ll notice that most derivatives have the words palm, stear, laur or glyc in them. Looking out for these four words can help you identify at least 50% of the palm oil derivatives that pop up in the products we buy.

If you spot one of these words in an ingredient list, then it doesn’t mean for certain that a product contains palm oil. However, it is a good tip to go on, that warrants checking with the manufacturer for clarification.

Issues Related To Growth & Production

Whilst palm oil may be favoured by manufacturers, it has its dark side. Palm oil is the biggest contributor to rainforest deforestation and destruction. Its production destroys unique habitats of already endangered species and contributes to climate change. And there are links to the exploitation of workers.

Here’s a closer look at those issues:

Links to Deforestation & Habitat Loss

As palm oil is so ubiquitous in our daily lives, producers are responding to this demand by ramping up the supply.

However, the expansion of oil palm plantations often comes at the expense of tropical rainforests and biodiverse habitats. In regions like Southeast Asia, where the majority of oil is produced, large swathes of pristine forests have been cleared to make way for plantations, leading to habitat destruction and loss of species, including endangered ones like the orangutans, tigers, Sumatran rhinos, and pygmy elephants.

At one point, it was calculated that a football pitch-sized patch of virgin rainforest was cleared every 25 seconds to make way for plantations and production is increasing to meet the demands of a growing world population.

As producers are replacing trees for oil palm trees, it may not sound like a big deal, but animals need diverse habitats to live and thrive in. Palm oil plantations are what’s known as monocultures – where only one species grows. They cannot support diverse populations of animals.

Links To Climate Change

As well as being an ecologically important habitat, the tropical peat forests in Indonesia are climatically important too. Known as carbon sinks, these forests growing in carbon-rich peat soils store more carbon per square metre than any other ecosystem in the world.

When these peat bogs are drained and converted to oil palm plantations, they release millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.

To make matters worse, the peat forests are often cleared to make way for plantations by burning them. Known as peatland megafires, these fires give off huge amounts of carbon, compounding the problem. As a result of these practices, Indonesia is the ninth-largest global emitter of greenhouse gases.

Social Implications

Beyond its environmental impact, palm oil production also raises serious social concerns. Indigenous communities and smallholder farmers often face displacement from their lands to make room for plantations, leading to loss of livelihoods, cultural heritage, and food security.

Labour practices in some plantations have also come under scrutiny, with reports of human rights abuses within the industry. This includes child labour, forced labour, and unsafe working conditions.

Is Sustainable Palm Oil Actually Sustainable?

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was formed in 2004 in response to increasing concerns about the impacts of palm oil. It has three main aims:

• Halting deforestation
• Treating communities and workers fairly
• Protecting wildlife and the environment

As such, ‘sustainable palm oil’ and RSPO-certified labels have popped up on the packaging of some products that we buy. With these labels, you might think that the problem has been solved. Unfortunately, it is not so. Critics say there are problems with the certification and it is “inadequate” as a guarantee that the oil in use did not lead to deforestation. 

Greenpeace reported in 2021 in its Destruction Certified investigation that whilst the RSPO has relatively strong environmental and social standards on paper, implementation of its standards is often weak. It found a litany of problems including:

• serious audit failures being reported
• many members are failing to fully meet the membership requirements.
• conflicts of interest

This led to Greenpeace declaring that “overall RSPO certified oil cannot be guaranteed to be free of deforestation or human rights abuses”.

What Can We Do?

If you’re looking to take action on palm oil, then you might consider boycotting palm oil altogether. It seems like a sensible option, however, unfortunately, it’s not so simple.

As I mentioned before, oil palm trees are efficient. They produce much more oil per unit of land area than most other oil-producing plants. For example, if we all switched to oil produced from soy, we’d need 9 times more land than oil palm trees to produce the same amount of oil. All that we’d achieve would be shifting the problem from one part of the world to another.

Instead of boycotting palm oil, for the biggest impact, I’d recommend choosing to buy only from companies that have a firm commitment to ending deforestation in their supply chain. WWF’s palm oil scorecard is a useful tool to help you in this, as it ranks brands on their commitments, traceability, on-the-ground action, supplier accountability and more.

I’d also recommend joining campaigns to help force big brands to end deforestation in their supply chains, such as Greenpeace, which has been campaigning for over a decade to help clean up the industry.