Clean Air or Clean Hair? Palm Oil In Everything

Actually the other day I realised how many of the products I have at home have palm oil or its derivatives in the content list. Food, shampoo and many others...
All this because not long ago a big holding that makes many of this products (hint:shampoos and similar stuff) declared that they cannot assure that the oil they receive has origin in sustainable palm plantations, because they weren't responsible for what their providers did or not.
This really angered me and I've decided to try and find (and use) products that do not use palm oil... I went to the supermarket and found that it is quite difficult!
What products do you use that don't use palm oil?

Palm oil is good, the greedy predator capitalists with their corporate protection armor on are to blame. Changing legislation for the formation of multi-national corporations to include a earth friendly responsibility clause might help. We need change in the government to reflect the new sensitivities of an educated public. The Black American community is leading the way, they will no longer accept the dumbing down of their children by the public school system, and in Toronto Canada, they are insisting on segregation from the white dumb-down system in place, and are opting for a reality based, non-corporate biased semi-socialist curriculum, not controlled by white oil/steel/resource baron stockholders on the school board. They are using racism as a wedge to gain this advantage - just think, poor blacks with a private school level education fighting for re-forestation in the palm oil plantations. The future is getting brighter!

Amen Gustav!

I tried to and the few I did find had many other nasty chemical/chemical-based products... so, what is a treehugger to do.

At the author, thanks for the article, but it only half addresses the issue if you are going to list the offensive articles but not provide a solution. (No, we don't NEED oreos, but some essential products, what would their alternatives be?)

Thanks,
Tom-tom

Yay! I am glad to see articles like this! The weirdest and most disturbing thing I ever saw was when flying into Singapore once and seeing entire islands to the east of Singapore which had been completely and utterly razed and were now covered - every single square inch, I kid you not - with orderly lined up palm trees. I was horrified - entire ecosystems destroyed on these islands to grow palm trees!
There just has to be better alternatives out there than that.

What really freaks me out is that palm oil is a very common ingredient in vegan food, as a butter or margarine substitute. Here I thought I'd been helping the world by eating vegan, when all this time I've had blood on my hands.

It just goes to show that any time you eat processed and packaged food, you're taking a chance. Until some better sort of food origin tracking can be worked out by the free market, it's farmers markets and home grown tomatoes for me.

Thank you so much for bringing attention to the palm oil issue. The ecological crimes being perpetrated in Indonesia and Malaysia in the name of corporate greed are truly horrific. Entire forests are being removed from the earth-- along with every living creature in them. Indigenous Dayak people are being duped out of their lands throughout Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). Gentle, peaceful orangutans are suffering what can only be called a 'genocide'. Whole populations are being wiped out. Babies are being captured and sold into the illegal pet trade. Most die in transit. A few of the luckier ones end up in sanctuaries like Nyaru Menteng, which is operated by the BOS Foundation and managed by Lone Droscher Nielsen. You can see some of the residents on Animal Planet's 'Orangutan Island'.
Orangutans may become extinct in the wild in less than three years-- unless the deforestation is stopped NOW. To learn more about the problem and see how you can help protect orangutans, please visit the Orangutan Outreach website: http://redapes.org

Thank you,

Richard Zimmerman
Director, Orangutan Outreach
Reach out and save the orangutans!

We should consider which is more important to us, human or animal life. While it is terrible that these animals are losing their habitats and efforts should be made to alleviate this suffering, palm oil isn't harvested by corporate bad-guys with rolled up sleeves. Most is produced by poor communities that depend heavily or even solely on the revenue they receive from their plantations. Do you think these people will be happy when their only source of income is condemned by the western world sitting before their computers in air conditioned houses? The best we can do for the environment is to reduce demand, while it would degrade life for millions of people it wouldn't kill all of them.

What can I compare this to? Maybe: people kill people, not guns.

No matter what crop you tear down a forest for, it is bad. It could be organic hemp, it could be palm oil, it could be medicinal poppy fields or rice. There isn't anything inherently bad about Palm Oil. Though I do agree that products that are not sustainable are to be avoided, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. Oil Palm can be a GREAT resource, and that should be promoted, not vilified. It's ignorance that is causing this problem in the first place.

In the meantime, if y'all boycot products that came from raping the environment somewhere (and you should), you'll have about 30 days until you starve to death, assuming you are drinking rain water. My advice: grow your own food. And include a few oil palms in the mix. It doesn't take many to fuel your vege-oil car perpetually.

As a vegan, I too thought I was doing everything I could for the environment, until a recent trip to Borneo volunteering at a gibbon sanctuary. Palm oil is ubiquitous - it's litterally everywhere. But we can try to at least reduce demand by avoiding processed foods, look for cleaning and bathing products without pallm oil. Also, pressure governments to ban the product. Palm oil is one of the few plant-based products that has saturated fat - clogs the arteries. So we sure don't need to consume it.

To all of you who fret about avoiding palm oil in food, I say this: palm oil when used only for food never has been a problem. The problem arose when it began to be used as a "biofuel" precisely to placate unthinking eco-freaks like you, since the quantities needed for energy production far suspass those needed to feed people. This has happened with every single crop grown for fuel purposes. Does corn ethanol ring a bell? Not only do environents get degraded, people starve from competition by power plants!

Leave the food for the people alone! that's real ecofriendliness.

The only tried-and-true environmentally sound energy is nuclear fission: it is virtually harmless to nature: check out Chernobyl. After the worst accident in nuclear history nature is better there than anywhere else because humans are afraid of leftover radiation. But even humans were only minimally harmed...

Nuclear energy pollutes much less than any other. It generates almost no carbon dioxide now and if well established it will produce none. It spews no sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, lead, mercury into the environment like coal and oil do. It degrades no lands like wind and solar and biofuels do, nor does it compete with people for precious food resources like biofuels do.

True the waste form nuclear plants is highly radioactive and dangerous, BUT it is concentrated in a very very tiny place. Furthermore, it is only highly dangerous for 300 years, plus it is that dangerous only because most of the original energy is still there. With new developments and technology the waste becomes reactor fuel again several times. At the end of the cycle and with further processing it becomes much safer. Again, this is only with humans in mind, because nature would not be harmed nearly as much by releases of even the most radioactive waste as it is now by fossil fuels, biofuels and "renewable" energy, Chernobyl being the prime example.

Instead, nuclear fission would produce the abundant clean energy needed to keep up productivity of goods and food to alleviate povety and hunger; it would keep humanity thriving in a pristine Earth until nuclear fusion becomes practical with huge energy production and nearly zero waste. Nuclear energy is the only alternative that is both Earth-frindly and humane to us.

Hi, Lloyd. I don't think you're "ignorant", or engaging in any kind of gratuitous industry-bashing. It's clear that you feel very strongly about this issue, and simply want your position known. I enjoy reading your blog, and urge you to continue articulating your opinions.

But I would ask you to begin seeing the palm oil industry not as a monolith, but comprising many different players – as is the case with all other large industries. At the very least, you could perhaps differentiate between the two largest palm oil-producing countries - Malaysia and Indonesia - because they have not had the same palm oil cultivation experience. Malaysia’s practices are far more sustainable than Indonesia’s (not to your satisfaction perhaps, but enough to distinguish it from its much larger South East Asian neighbor) and it seems to be leading the way on many fronts in this relatively-new and still-growing industry. I think Malaysia has demonstrated that creating palm oil plantations isn’t inherently destructive to the environment – actually, it may even help it. Which isn’t to say that Indonesia’s palm oil industry is out of control – its larger size may be making things harder to regulate – but the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil is making great strides in making sure that things there are in order.

Thanks for letting me comment. For more on this, I point you to… not the Palm Oil Truth Foundation website, but www.palmoilconsumer.com.