K-POP stans and crunchy snack fans for the planet!

April 19, 2024 12:03 PM

K-pop fans organized by KPOP4PLANET pressure Hyundai into ending a greenwashed dirty energy aluminum deal in Indonesia. Will the collective action of snackers and ramen slurpers end PepsiCo's reliance on palm oil from deforested areas? PalmWatch is a brand new tool to trace palm oil supplies from the ground level (% of tree cover area lost by country), to the processing mills, to middleman parent corporations, and to the consumer brands that use the oil in their products.

Word to the wise. Don't trust "Snacking Made Right" ESG report from the maker of Oreos and Ritz crackers. And "sustainable palm oil" certification is no panacea and can greenwash some of the worst companies.

posted by spamandkimchi (5 comments total)

Thanks. I appreciate knowing these tools exist.
posted by humbug at 3:26 PM on April 19 [2 favorites]

We should be be planting and consuming MORE palm oil, not less.

Yields per hectare planted

Palm Oil - 2.99 tonnes
Rapeseed Oil - 0.73 tonnes
Sunflower Oil - 0.63 tonnes
Soybean Oil - 0.47 tonnes
Olive Oil - 0.32 tonnes

"The world devotes more than 300 million hectares for oilcrop production. Palm oil accounts for 6% of this land use, which is small when we consider that it produces 36% of the oil." (Our World in Data)

I enjoy my olive oil but it's literally causing 10x more deforestation than Palm Oil per serve.

Oh wait, deforestation in Western countries doesn't count...
posted by xdvesper at 5:06 PM on April 19

I enjoy my olive oil but it's literally causing 10x more deforestation than Palm Oil per serve.

What?
posted by mittens at 5:25 PM on April 19 [2 favorites]

I mean. The decimation of, say, the Acadian forest under British colonial expansion was indeed terrible. But also, it has now already happened. And the underlying soils were rich enough that something approximating the original ecosystem could regrow in the same area. These are important differences to the forests being destroyed for palm oil production. In those cases, the amount of carbon storage and ability to mediate climate change that we lose per hectare destroyed is significantly greater, and in many tropical rainforests (from what I understand), the nutrient cycling in the ecosystem is primarily in the living material, with the soils unable to sustain the same sort of regrowth once that ecosystem is destroyed. And that’s not even getting into other, non-plant species loss issues, or the interaction between human encroachment on such ecosystems and novel zoonotic diseases. The appropriate measure is tonnes of oil produced per climate or ecosystem impact.

Honourable mention: that whole ongoing-colonialism issue, including working conditions for human labourers producing each variety of food oil, or the ethics of consumption by richer countries being based in environmental degradation in poorer countries. We should deforest our own countries first if that sort of consumption is important to us. And also measure things in tonnes of oil produced per worker injuries or deaths or instances of slavery or abuse of workers or some sort of Gini index type measure of proportion of profit disbursed to workers.
posted by eviemath at 4:09 AM on April 20 [8 favorites]

Palm oil is popular for processed food because semisolid at room temperature. If you eat processed food, then palm oil is less bad than butter or trans fats, but its not too heathy.

It's plausible much stronger international pressure against single-use plastics would somewhat bring down demand for palm oil and other semisolid oils.

At least some similarity between palm oil consumption and ocean plastics polution too. As an aside, only 2% of plastic waste is traded so those dramatic figures largely represent consumption, not nations exporting their waste.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:54 AM on April 21