First of all, we have a huge advantage today: modern technology. Almost everybody has a smartphone – and we can use it for more than just texting. There is a free app called Codecheck. The use of this app is very simple and can make your life a lot easier if you are trying to track down certain ingredients. You have to scan the bar code or the QR-code on the back of the product you want to check, and within some seconds the result appears on the screen of your smartphone. It gives all information about the name and the price. Scrolling down, you get a list of all the ingredients. The app rates the ingredients as critical, uncritical and gives you further information about why a certain “critical” ingredient is rated like this. For example, it tells you if it is problematic for people with allergies. So, using this advantage of modern technology, you can track down palm oil when you are shopping. Also, it tells you if the product can be combined with a certain diet like vegan, gluten free, vegetarian or else. Codecheck gives you information about seals of approval or environmental standards as well. Lastly, it lists pros and cons of the product which come from the evaluation of other people using the app – you can evaluate the product yourself if you want, too.

Secondly, there are also palm oil free products right in front of our noses when we go to the supermarket. It might not stare you in the face right away – but take one step closer to the shelves and scan carefully. In one of the Rewes in Bayreuth, for instance, there is a whole shelf with products that don’t contain palm oil. Different kinds of spread  such as chocolate spread – you see, there is a solution for all Nutella lovers-, peanut butter or vegetable spread. The shelf is right next to the shelf with bread, close to the section with all the organic and fair-trade products.

Thirdly, we wrote about the problems with daily cosmetics and hygienic products. Liquid soap, for example contains palm oil. But you could switch to products that either use organically produced palm oil or – even better – palm oil that doesn’t come from monocultures but from mixed cultures or palmoil free products. You can find a variety of these alternative soaps at dm drug stores. Also, the German website Utopia gives good overviews of alternative, environmentally sound products: One of their entries is about palm oil free curd soaps, they also provide the link to the web pages/stores that sell them.

We hope that this blog entry will help others to reduce their consumption of vegetable oils, more specifically palm oil. If you know any other alternatives, ways to check ingredients of grocery, cosmetics or something else, feel free to comment on this page. Let’s start to accumulate the knowledge to make this world a better place.

The post Make palm oil small again! appeared first on Global Change Ecology.

To find out when I consume palm oil, I had to do some research. What exactly is the term for palm oil, written in the very thin and very small letters at the back side of shampoo bottles or sizzling plastic bags? Actually, there are more than 200 names which hide the original ingredient palm oil: They can be cryptic like Caprylic triglyceride or they sound like the short names of diseases for example APG or BTMS. A lot of food products for instance don’t use the term palm oil but the much broader term “vegetable oil”. But the most common designations I stumbled upon were Sodium Laureth Sulfate and nebulous circumscriptions containing the word “Coco” or “Coca” – like Cocamidopropyl Betaine and Cocamide MEA. My self-experiment thus consisted of many looks at the backside of packaging and sometimes almost frustrating research for unknown words and terms.

So, my week of tracking palm oil in my life starts on Monday, already at breakfast time: Normally, I prepare a porridge with some fruits. To make it a little bit tastier, I add a teaspoon of peanut butter – which in my case contains “palm fat from certified organic agriculture.” This would be the first thing to delete from my daily food then. I am skiing this week, so instead of having a proper lunch, there is this genius invention of granola bars. Here I find palm oil as an ingredient as well. In the shower I have a closer look at shampoo and shower gels: The gel is from Lavera, a natural cosmetic brand – and still it contains Sodium Coco Sulfate – again an indicator for palm oil, coming from “certified organic agriculture”, as the brand promises. The shampoo on the other hand is just from Nivea and reading through the ingredients I find the term Cocamidopropyl Betaine. Afterwards I search for this term in the internet and – surprise! – it is another expression for palm oil.

On Tuesday, there isn’t much of a change as I use mostly the same products. Just the granola bar is another one; and still it has palm oil in it.

Wednesday I realize that I have forgotten to check some more products: First of all, the toothpaste I use every morning. It has Sodium Lauryl Sulfate listed as an ingredient – by now I know this is palm oil. Secondly, as we are in the mountains and there is a lot of sun, we need sunscreen every day. The sunscreen I use as contains astonishingly no palm oil, but when I do some research on the ingredients I figure out there is a substance which is suspected to cause cancer. Great – no palm oil, but cancer-causing. My daily face cream also doesn’t have palm oil listed in the ingredients, but I find coconut oil. This is, as known from the previous article about palm oil, not necessarily a better alternative. In the evening, after a long day on the slope, I treat myself with Milka chocolate. It is incredibly tasty – but then I realize I should check for palm oil. And on this purple-white packaging, it is firstly written in the easiest way to detect: palm oil. The former incredibly sweet and tasty chocolate in my mouth starts beginning to taste a bit like a small crime.

On Thursday, we go cross-country skiing which is much more exhausting than just sliding down the slopes. Therefore, I took a Balisto bar for more sugar and therefore more energy. Looking at the backside of the colourful plastic foil, our sought-after ingredient hides behind the term hardened palm fat. Before cooking in the evening, I wash my hands and realize that I also didn’t check the soap in the bathroom. It actually contains two palm-oil based ingredients: Sodium Laureth Sulfate and Cocamide MEA.

Leaving the mountains on Friday noon, I am able to go to the birthday party of two friends in the evening. They prepared some pizzas and chips and other goodies. I attract some astonishing looks as I crawl almost inside the cupboard to dig into the trash bin to find the packaging. When I finally find them, palm oil is listed on the carton of the pizzas and Tortilla chips are made of corn, salt and palm oil.

On Saturday, astonishingly, nothing new adds to the list of palm oil containing ingredients. At least, that is what I think. Until I check the can of roasted nuts for ingredients – palm oil is one of the main components next to the nuts themselves.

Sunday evening, there are wraps for dinner. The whiteish wheat-based flat cakes are shrink-wrapped and I don’t really think that palm oil could be an ingredient of this basic dough. But I am wrong: Even here, palm oil is used for the mixture of the wraps.

After this week of tracking down palm oil, I am quite unsure which products I can use with a good conscience. But as in the first article on palm oil it becomes evident that we can – at least partly – control the use of palm oil by establishing a conscious way of consumption. Not only considering palm oil, but all products that contain alternative oils like coconut oil or rapeseed oil.

The post Experiment: Tracking down palm oil appeared first on Global Change Ecology.

But why is the demand for palm oil that high? It is everywhere, literally. We can find it in our food – the most famous example might be Nutella – but also in other groceries like muesli or pastry. Sanitary products like body lotions, shower gels, deodorants – a huge majority of them contains palm oil. The oil is obtained from the shell of the fruit by pressure. The fruit of the oil palm is much more effective – compared to sunflowers or rapeseed which both are also used for oil production, the oil palm needs much less area to grow. As we are living in a consumption-based society, the call for more palm oil gets louder; the number of plantations is rising and thus the area of pristine tropical forests is shrinking.

Ecological and financial impacts of the palm oil industry

According to World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the impacts of palm oil production are alarming: Fire clearing leads to habitat loss and fragmentation of habitats that are normally home to many endangered species. The fires of the burning forests release substances into the air such as carbon dioxide. They pollute the air and have therefore heavy impacts on the health of the people living in the areas where fire clearing is actually happening. WWF also mentions climate change as a consequence because tropical forests are major carbon sinks – by burning them, the CO2 stored in the plants is released into the atmosphere and thus accelerates the warming of our planet.

A FAO report from 2014 revealed that the top exporters and therefore also top producers of palm oil are Malaysia and Indonesia. A figure in this report shows that India and China are by far the biggest importers of the oil produced in South East Asia: India bought palm oil from Indonesia for 4340 million dollars, China came close by spending 2389 million to Malaysia and 1868 million dollars to Indonesia. Obviously, the palm oil market is booming. But Germany can’t deny its own portion of the share: It is one of the major importers of Malaysian palm oil as well. According to a WWF Germany report, Germany imported 1,5 million tons of palm oil in the year 2013; most of that palm oil is used for bio fuel and food production.

Alternatives don’t solve the problem

Palm oil is evil – this thought has been fixed in the minds of many. But there is (as in so many cases) also another side of the medal. In 2016, the WWF Germany has published a report about the consequences of palm oil cultivation. In this report, also alternatives are analysed: It finds that replacing palm oil with alternative oils like coconut or soy oil would even worsen the situation because they need much more area to grow and produce less oil.

The solution for this dilemma is actually quite simple. If we stopped using palm oil as biomass fuel and if we established a more conscious consume of chocolate, chips, other sweets and instant meals, we could reduce the current use of palm oil by 50%.

But instead of only saying if, if, if we should start acting. Therefore, I am going to start an experiment next week: I want to figure out, which products in my day to day life contain palm oil or palm-oil-based ingredients and try to reduce them. In the last year, I already tried to reduce the use of those products, but I guess that there is still a lot to do. But as the WWF example showed, a total ban of palm oil is not the way to go. That is why I also want to check for alternative solutions or ideas how to replace products that are a threat to our environment.

The post The price for soft skin and a sweet breakfast appeared first on Global Change Ecology.