Our Position On Palm Oil
What Is Palm Oil?
Palm oil is one of the most efficient and widely used vegetable oils that comes from the fruit of oil palm trees. Find it everywhere, in cleaning products, biscuits, chocolate, cosmetics and sprayed on your favourite fried foods.
Why Palm Oil?
Why do we use it? Because it’s useful, cheap, high-yielding, and versatile. Palm oil trees are quick to fruit, have low production costs than other oils and they fruit continuously, meaning they’re a reliable crop to grow and accessible for smallholders.
So Why The Issue?
The problem: palm oil is the biggest contributor to rainforest destruction. Its production destroys unique habitats and contributes to climate change.
Deforestation means displacement of indigenous people and wildlife habitat loss as old growth rainforest is cleared to make way for new plantations.
Palm oil isn’t just a threat for wildlife: it’s a threat for the climate. Another concern with palm oil is that many areas used for oil palm plantations are natural peatlands. Clearing of peatlands and planting of oil palms in these ares increase risk of fire, and the UN suggests peatland fires contribute around 5% of human-caused carbon emissions.
Palm oil is also the 6th most heavily fertilised food crop in the world per hectare. Nitrogen based fertilisers are made using natural gas, used to react with nitrogen gas in the air at high temperatures. This requires fossil fuels not only for the reaction but also to get to these temperatures.
Current estimates indicate that the nitrogen fertiliser industry accounts for 3-5% of all natural gas used and causes more than 1% of all greenhouses gas emissions produced worldwide.
So, What Are We Doing?
We've set out our position on sustainable palm oil and are ensuring unsustainable palm oil remains removed from our supply chain. We are committed to ensuring all our products sold and used within our business which contain palm oil or palm oil derivates come from a certified sustainable source. Read our Palm Oil Policy here.
