From Go Green Northfield:

Palm oil is used as an ingredient more than any other vegetable oil because it is cheap and versatile, making both your lipstick smooth and your cookie crunchy. It is high yield, requires less land and and is used in over half of products sold in our grocery stores. This means it’s in high demand and is a profitable crop for global farmers. This also means that palm farming, along with a handful of other crops, has a big carbon footprint and is responsible for over half of global agricultural deforestation.

As you might assume, palms grow in tropical locales, which are also home to rainforests and peat bogs. Both of these environments are key when it comes to natural carbon sequesteration, not to mention they are home to indigenous communities and hundreds of endangered species. These areas are burned in order to make way for palm plantations, which helped to make palm oil production responsible for one-third of Indonesia’s forest loss between 2000 and 2019.

So can we avoid buying products with palm oil in them? Nope, it’s become too ubiquitous. But we can look for products that use palm oil that’s been farmed sustainably:

  • Check out the WWF Palm Oil Buyers Scorecard that tracks brands and where they buy their palm oil from.
  • Look for the Certified Sustainable Palm Oil label from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the industry’s leading certification body.
  • Use the palm oil scan app developed by the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums to see how the products you are grabbing off the shelf score on the sustainability scale.