Mondelez cuts ties with 12 palm oil suppliers, citing deforestation

I mean there is a chance I've got a product with wrong labeling. I just accept I have to trust other people or the labels to figure out if information is incorrect.

And it can go under so many names after it's been processed by the Oleochemical industry - https://www.ran.org/the-understory/palm_oil_s_dirty_secret_t...

Their liquid soap doesn't contain palm oil.

My parents, born in India in late 50s, rarely had access to soaps and detergents growing up in the countryside. They are still very conscientious in how much detergent they use. It's a lot of bad habits that mega-corps have tried to push onto us.

(1) as a feedstock for making surfactants in personal cleaners (shampoos, toothpaste, bath gel) like sodium laureth sulfate [1]; (2) as a substitute for partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (incl. trans fats) in food manufacturing; partial hydrogenation of vegetable oils (containing unsaturated fatty acids) will alter their melting point and texture to produce solid-at-room-temp shortening; and (3) as a cooking oil. Lately, it has also seen some use in biodiesel.

To replace palm oil in surfactants, you can use coconut oil (which is even more intensive to produce), or by synthesizing the precursors from mined hydrocarbons (typically oil or natural gas) using a variety of clever chemical reactions; or lard from animals, which requires raising animals.

To replace palm oil in food manufacturing, you can use coconut oil, lard, or you can partially hydrogenate unsaturated fatty acids derived from many vegetable oils; by doing the latter you're converting some of your product into trans fat.

To replace palm oil in cooking, choose from a variety of other oils and fats.

Unfortunately, almost all of the European and US consumption is for manufacturing, while elsewhere it's used for cooking as well. While European and US suppliers do own palm oil plantations, they also source from other producers. This complicates the market: boycotts against big manufacturers of soap or food will drive the price of palm oil lower, increasing the likelihood that it will be offloaded to a different set of countries as cheap cooking oil.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodecanol

(Fueling a ship with bunker oil is only slightly less bad to the environment than shoveling baby koalas into the furnace.)

There was a story posted earlier this week about orangutan populations on decline due to Cadbury using Palm Oil.

This story made me rather angry, as they are just trying to live and we need to make sure they can.

You're seeing results now, but that doesn't mean the actions haven't been going on for a while. When I was at Unilever ~7 years ago, I sat across from one of the environmental lawyers working on their sustainability initiatives. At that point in time, in order to sustainably source palm oil you had to:

1) Define what "sustainable" meant 2) Create, support, or at the very least integrate with whatever body does the certification and monitoring of the sustainability aspect 3) Drill down multiple levels deep and ensure you know the entire chain of custody of your raw supplies at all times. The equivalent of recursively auditing every single dependency of every single dependency in your source code, where every single dependency has the ability to arbitrarily inject net new dependencies without notice. 4) Enough market clout to force suppliers through all of this hassle. Which in the end doesn't net the supplier much additional income, since the increased prices get eaten by the increased compliance and production costs. 5) Enough compliant global suppliers to minimize supply risk. 6) Time delay related to implementation of all of the above, plus contract re-negotiations with suppliers which add in language related to the sustainability obligations.

Unilever disclosed earlier this year the entire list of 300 direct suppliers and 1,400 mills they source palm oil from[1]. They've also shown their suppliers that the requirement has teeth and that non-compliance will result in being dropped[2]. That's only possible after over a decade of effort in rolling out the global resources, infrastructure, processes, and supply chain risk planning necessary to be able to do so at such a massive scale. But now that supply chain transparency for palm oil has been developed at scale by the large CPG[3] companies, the sustainable sourcing barrier is a lot lower for mid-sized manufacturers and we'll hopefully start seeing more of this.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-unilever-palmoil-transpar...

[2] https://www.cips.org/en/supply-management/news/2018/may/unil...

[3] Consumer Packaged Goods. Companies like Unilever, P&G, Mars, etc that make all the random little things you pick up from the store during your day-to-day shopping.

In any case, the ad seems to be having no trouble reaching people.

Notice that Clearcast wouldn't have recommended against the ad if it had been created by Iceland.

Iceland are allowed to create ads saying "we've stopped using palm oil, and here's why".

This is, in short, a transparent marketing ploy.

Let's say 100 farmers around the world sell palm oil, for $100 a tub. About half wreck the environment, about half are very careful and replant what they harvest.

Western people come in and start to refuse to buy the "environment wrecking" Palm Oil. So they go to the environmental friendly sellers, and start paying $150 for ethical palm oil. On the other hand, people that don't care or places that can get away with it continue to use forest destroying palm oil. There is now a price difference ($100 for normal stuff, $150 for ethical stuff), so most non-western demand shifts to the cheap stuff.

End result: Still 100 farmers selling palm oil. 50 being ethical, and 50 not.

The 50 unethical farmers still make $100 per tub. The 50 ethical farmers now make $150 per tub.

The environment seems no different. The only difference is that $50 got transferred from the banks of wealthy westerners to the ethical palm oil farmers. Which is nice and all, but I am not seeing how it changed anything in the environment.

You would need almost EVERYONE to switch to the ethical route for it to do anything. That would cause surplus supply and price drops of unethical palm oil. Even 50% of users switching seems not nearly enough.

Ok I was wrong, India is 15%, and EU consumes a surprisingly high percentage at 12%. But still, subtracting the EU and US, 85% of the oil is consumed by developing countries that are too poor to worry about the environmental impacts.

The cost is higher. I don't use the sustainably produced oil now. When all is said and done, it might increase my unit cost by ~15%--which is manageable really since unit margins are decent. The reason I don't use it is about 1 part Scrooge McDuck and 3 parts skepticism/cynicism. Without a relationship with the actual producers, I don't know what "sustainably produced" actually means.

For example, I would never say in a whiny voice, “that plant only grows because it gets watered!” or “that student only works hard for good grades!” or “that product is only good because the brand wants to make more money!”

My point is: the why is less important to observe than the how. In this case, the WHY is that this company is just looking out for its own interests (it’s obvious, that’s what they do). HOW is it looking out for it’s own interests? By recognizing that it needs to be accountable to the critical, ethical public.

That is super cool and very interesting.

> Half of the Bornean orangutan population has been wiped out in just 16 years, with habitat destruction by the palm oil industry a leading driver. More than three-quarters of Tesso Nilo national park, home to tigers, orangutans and elephants, has been converted into illegal palm oil plantations. Globally, 193 Critically Endangered, Threatened and Vulnerable species are threatened by palm oil production.

> The plantation sector – palm oil and pulp – is the single largest driver of deforestation in Indonesia. Around 24 million hectares of rainforest was destroyed in Indonesia between 1990 and 2015, according to official figures released by the Indonesian government [1].