Palm Oil and the Destruction of Orangutans, by Amanda Blue Zheutlin

It seems like the more I read about going green, the more examples I'm given of how interconnected the world is. The long line of contributors and affected parties to every product I pick up off a shelf seems extensive and not intuitive. Like, how the shine on the apple I bought be a product of the farmers in Nebraska who planted and harvested corn that eventually went into making the preservatives they sprayed on that apple. And if you buy beef made by Bertin, a large cattle company in Brazil, you're contributing to the mass deforestation occurring in that region (read my blog on that here). How crazy is that?

Most recently, I've been reading about palm oil. I don't know how widely spread this information is, but as it turns out, palm oil is one of those tricky ingredients in EVERYTHING (like corn -- and if you don't know about corn's mass grab for world domination, read the Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan because it's AWESOME). It's in biscuits, chocolate, margarine, soaps, moisturizers and shower gel to name only a few -- I've read it's in about 1 in 10 products in grocery stores. Watch out for the generic term "vegetable oil" which usually includes palm oil. Anyway, why is palm oil no good? Once again, I had to look beyond the shelf and this time, out to Borneo (who knew?) Apparently, palm oil is farmed by knocking down rainforest and making it a palm oil plantation which not only kills all the intensely diverse and dense populations of wildlife and plant life (420 birds, 210 mammals including gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees, 254 reptiles, 368 freshwater fish and around 15,000 plants), but also pushes out indigenous people. Not only that, but the use of palm oil is responsible, according to Greenpeace, for 4% of the world's global climate-change emissions. And what's more is that, "Since 1990, the amount of land used for palm-oil production has increased by 43 per cent. Demand is rising at between six and 10 per cent a year. China's billion-plus population is the biggest consumer, importing 18 per cent of global supply. About 16 per cent arrives in the EU," wrote Martin Hickman for the The Independent, a London newspaper.

Alright so there's a light in the dark; there exists sustainable palm oil which is pretty sweet. Unfortunately it's 35% more expensive to produce and almost no companies are buying it. "The volume of certified palm oil traded is disappointingly low so far; the reason for this being that many companies are not prepared to pay a premium for certified oil," said Jan Kees Vis, Unilever's director of sustainable agriculture and chairman of the Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). While most companies claim to use a very small amount, clearly the amount used today is too much and growing.

So what needs to happen? Basically, knowledge is power here and the more people know about all the orangutans who are killed by palm oil (they are moving towards extinction because of their loss of habitat), the more likely people are to take action. And companies need to be pushed to go green, especially when it's initially less profitable. Consumers need to make it unprofitable to not be green by not supporting those companies to contribute to global warming and the destruction of the Earth. One step you can take today is to join Get Green Music, which spreads information and tips on green living every day. You can also download music at GGM which supports green charities who work to fix the damage done already to the Earth.