We launched our Sustainable Palm Oil Campaign in 2012. Since then, we’ve worked with partners in the UK and worldwide to make sustainable a reality.
Sustainable palm oil is a way of producing palm oil that ensures minimal impact on the environment of the regions it’s grown in. It’s a key aspect of our work in conserving biodiversity worldwide, and as a conservation zoo, we encourage everyone to use the information on this page to learn more about sustainable palm oil and why it’s so important.
Palm oil is a type of vegetable oil found in thousands of products, from cake, chocolate and margarine to lipstick, shampoo and detergents. It’s extremely versatile – palm oil can either be a liquid or a solid, has natural preservative effects, and has no smell or taste.
It’s the most widely used vegetable oil in the world due to its low cost and efficiency. In fact, palm oil supplies 35% of the world’s vegetable oil from just 10% of the global land dedicated to oil crops.
Palm oil itself is not necessarily bad. It’s a versatile vegetable oil that is extremely efficient. However, the unsustainable production of palm oil is one of the biggest threats to the forests and wildlife of areas where it’s grown like Borneo and Sumatra. Huge areas of rainforest have been cleared to make way for oil palm trees, destroying the habitats of a wide range of animals and plants including orangutans, other threatened primates and many endemic bird species.
Palm oil production is continuing to spread to other countries like the Philippines, Nigeria, and throughout South America.
Deforestation is a major environmental crisis, and is now the second leading cause of climate change globally, after burning fossil fuels. Agricultural expansion is thought to account for around 80% of deforestation. It’s vital that we do everything we can to fight this, and by choosing sustainable palm oil you can do your part!
There are different definitions of sustainable palm oil, but at its core this refers to palm oil that has been produced with the lowest environmental impact possible. This includes minimising impact to wildlife, and adhering to high standards of human rights.
The most widely recognised scheme is regulated by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). This is a voluntary scheme, and palm oil produced to RSPO standards is required to be deforestation-free.
Research has shown that the average carbon footprint of Certified Sustainable Palm Oil is 36% lower than for non-certified palm oil.
Making informed choices on sustainable palm oil in your purchases as a consumer and communicating this to manufacturers is one of the best ways you can make a real difference to conservation and protecting ecosystems. We’ve put together a whole host of resources to help you get started:
Our mission is preventing extinction, and a big part of that is aiming to be a major force in conserving biodiversity worldwide.
We’ve set out our position on sustainable palm oil and are ensuring unsustainable palm oil is being removed from our supply chain.
At Chester Zoo, the strength of our voice and the breadth of our audiences means we can open eyes to the environmental challenges that face our planet and empower people to be part of the solution.
We started to spread awareness of the movement through our Sustainable Palm Oil Communities project. In 2019 our hometown of Chester officially became the world’s first Sustainable Palm Oil City, following our work with local businesses, restaurants and community advocates. We’re now building partnerships with organisations around the UK to create even more Sustainable Palm Oil Communities, in places like Dorset, Oxford, and Newquay.
We also carry out work directly in habitats around the world affected by palm oil production. Our conservation work in South East Asia has been going on for over 15 years, working with partners such as HUTAN to study and address habitat issues caused by palm oil, including the effects on Bornean orangutans.
We’ve achieved a lot along the way since launching our Sustainable Palm Oil campaign. Here are some of the key milestones we’ve reached:
trees planted through corporate partnerships.
people reached through our social media channels.
SPO Champions in Chester demanding sustainable palm oil supply chains.
downloads of our Sustainable Palm Oil shopping list.
educators using our palm oil learning resources
Some groups see a complete boycott of palm oil as a solution to the impact it has on conservation and sustainability. But it’s important to remember that all agriculture has an impact on the environment, and as one of the most efficient vegetable oil crops, with the right approach palm oil can be less damaging than the alternatives.
Remember, palm oil produces up to nine times more oil per unit area than other major oil crops, so a switch to another type of edible vegetable oil (such as rapeseed oil) would require up to nine times as much land to produce the same yield. This would greatly increase deforestation and the effect on habitats.
A blanket boycott of palm oil could drive the price of palm oil down. This could increase demand, especially in markets which have less interest in sustainability and are bigger markets than the UK and Europe. This reduces the incentive to produce environmentally sustainable palm oil.
There are also the employment implications of palm oil production to consider. In producing countries, millions of people work in the palm oil sector. Palm oil plays an important role in the reduction of poverty in these areas. In Indonesia, over 4.5 million people earn their living from palm oil production. Stopping the production of palm oil altogether would create significant problems for these people who support their families by working in this industry.
If we don’t demand sustainable palm oil then the producers won’t have motivation to create it – we need to be part of the solution.
