How to buy sustainable palm oil

Many people know that palm oil can be implicated in environmental destruction. But it's very hard to avoid, and boycotting it may not always be the best way forward in any case.

Palm oil is in around 50% of products in UK supermarkets. It can be found in bread, chocolate, pastries, ice cream, noodles, pizzas and spreads, to name but a few. It's also used as a base ingredient in laundry detergents, washing-up liquid, soap, shampoo, body wash, toothpastes as well as other toiletries and beauty products.

When it comes to food products it's easy to spot, as it must be listed as an ingredient. But in cleaning products and toiletries, it's much harder to identify. Palm-based oleochemicals are used in thousands of products and go by a dizzying array of names – more than 200 of them in fact.

What's the problem with palm oil?

Palm oil is extracted from the fruit of the oil palm tree, a species native to Africa, but now grown extensively in Malaysia and Indonesia – in fact, 85% of the world's palm oil is grown in these two places and cultivating palm oil provides income for nearly five million people in these countries.

It's used as a cooking oil in the places its grown, but it's also incredibly versatile as a base ingredient, so it's shipped all over the world to be used in processed products. It keeps spreads spreadable, fried products crispy and biscuits crunchy. It forms the base for a multitude of ingredients used in beauty and household cleaning products. 

In other countries (but not the UK) it's used as a biofuel, despite this being hugely damaging in terms of the greenhouse gases released. It's also used in some animal feed, so even if you're carefully avoiding palm oil listed as an ingredient in your food, you may still indirectly be consuming it in meat and dairy.

As a crop, palm oil is very efficient. Its yield is much greater than that of any other crop grown to produce vegetable oil.

In 2023, palm oil accounted for 40% of global vegetable oil production, but used just 8.6% of the total land area used to grown vegetable oil crops. Put another way, you need four times more land to produce one tonne of rapeseed or sunflower oil and more than 10 times more land for one tonne of coconut oil. 

That efficiency means that it can be described as 'land-sparing'. But that masks the full story. Because it can only be grown in certain climates its cultivation can put vital, threatened ecosystems at risk. 

Palm oil production has wiped out vast swathes of rainforest, destroying the habitats of animals such orangutans and some species of elephant, rhino and tiger. Some palm oil is also grown on peatlands which must be drained before the trees can be planted. This process releases huge quantities of CO2 emissions.

But given that producing other types of vegetable oil requires a lot more land use, it's not as simple an equation as replacing like for like and asking producers to shift to other types of oil, which could cause even more harm to the natural environment.

Should you avoid palm oil?

Avoiding palm oil in food

Cutting down on the palm oil found in food may well come with benefits for your health, as well as the environment. That's because many products that contain palm oil are ultra processed, and high in fat and sugar. 

But really, you should aim to avoid these foods altogether rather than simply swap the oils inside them. 

NGOs, including the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), don't believe that we should be directly swapping out palm oil for other oil alternatives.

A spokesperson for WWF says the organisation 'believes that switching between vegetable oils can't address the challenges we face'. 

They added: 'Over the years, several companies have moved to substitute palm oil with other vegetable oils, driven by concerns about the sustainability of palm oil, health-related concerns and consumer demand, among other factors. 

'But without evidence of how these actions will help to reduce the global pressure of unsustainable vegetable oil production on biodiversity, ecosystem services and habitat conversion, WWF can't support any company that opts to remove palm oil from their products. The intended or unintended environmental and social consequences of switching to other oil-crops needs to be assessed scientifically.'

Avoiding palm oil in toiletries

In any case, when it comes to toiletries and cleaning products, removing palm oil from your shopping is much more difficult. 

As a starting point, you can look for four word roots, which indicate the presence of a vegetable oil that might be palm oil – these are palm, stear, laur or glyc. All four might be palm oil derivatives, but they can also suggest other vegetable oils, such as coconut. So even if you do see one of these on the back of your shampoo or detergent, it's impossible to know whether they are specifically palm oil-derived without checking with the manufacturer.

If you're determined to go palm-oil-free, Ethical Consumer is a good source of information and you can search its list of palm-oil-free brands and products.

Certified palm oil

If you are buying products that contain it, WWF and other NGOs recommend seeking out brands using certified sustainable palm oil. 

The Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was set up in 2004 by stakeholders including the WWF and Unilever. Around 20% of global palm oil is RSPO certified.

There are different supply chain models that members can choose. 

• RSPO credits (also known as book and claim) act as a type of offsetting where buyers are contributing to sustainable palm oil even if the palm oil in their products isn't certified. 
• Mass balance allows for the mixing of certified and non-certified palm oil. It means that some of what a company or brand is buying and using in their products will be certified but doesn't guarantee that the product you buy contains palm oil that has been sustainably sourced. Mass balance is a common type of certification within other sustainability schemes such as the FSC or the Rainforest Alliance. 
• Segregated palm oil can come from several sources mixed together during production, but is all sustainably sourced and kept separate from non-sustainable oil. This is one of the most robust types of certification.
• Identity preserved palm oil is all sustainably sourced from a single source and is kept separate from other palm oil during the whole production process. This is the other most robust option. 

Identity preserved and segregated are where the palm oil industry should ultimately be heading, according to the WWF. Mass balance and RSPO credits can be useful stepping stones in the process. 

The RSPO has had plenty of criticism over the years. It's possible to be an RSPO member and only certify a small amount of what you use. Campaigners also argue that standards aren't high enough and members aren't always adequately audited.

The WWF says the RSPO should be supported as certification is an important part of palm oil's future sustainability. But it also believes that certification on its own can't solve all the problems that palm oil can cause. 

Companies have to move beyond relying on certification to having their own clear policies that make sure all their supply chains are free from deforestation and conversion of other natural ecosystems to monoculture crops.

Companies that use palm oil should also be acting as 'agents of change' on the ground in the parts of the world affected by its agriculture, by contributing to meaningful conservation and restoration projects.

Do UK brands use sustainable palm oil?

As things stand, when palm oil is used as an ingredient in food, supply chains are generally more straightforward and you'll find that much of the palm oil you see listed as an ingredient is certified, especially in Europe. 

Food makes up the majority of palm oil use in the UK. Many food brands available in the UK use a high percentage of certified palm oil. All the major UK supermarkets use high levels of certified and segregated oil in their own-brand products. 

It's more complicated when it comes to products such as detergents and toiletries using oleochemicals – levels of certified oil are much lower in these industries overall. 

Supply chains are very complex and companies are often reliant on chemical processors to supply the ingredients for their products. Big brands in particular, through the weight of their influence, can have a significant impact on improving the amount of certified and segregated oil in supply chains.

Animal feed is another industry with a low percentage of certified oil in supply chains, so if you eat meat and dairy products you may well be inadvertently contributing to palm oil consumption that way.

How to buy products with sustainably sourced palm oil

Even if products are certified, they may not display the RSPO logo – there's a sense that companies aren't keen to draw attention to the use of an ingredient with such a poor reputation. 

While this can be confusing for consumers, it's more important to look at what a company is doing overall with regard to its palm oil policies and actions, rather than whether a particular product contains sustainable oil.

To find out more about a product on the go, the PalmOil Scan app is a useful tool. It's designed by the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA) and rates brands (you can scan a product's barcode with your phone's camera) on their palm oil policies and use of RSPO oil. Ratings are either Excellent, Good, Poor or No Commitment.

For a more detailed analysis, you can use the WWF Palm Oil Buyers' Scorecard. This assessment, repeated every two to three years to date, asks brands, including retailers, food service, food and non-food manufacturers for data on their palm oil policies, quantities RSPO-certified, traceability and investments in on the ground conservation and regeneration projects.

Some brands such as Cerelia, Ferrero, John Lewis, M&S, Lidl did extremely well – all scoring more than 22 points out of a possible 24. 

Nicola Brennan from the WWF, told us that its research 'shows that it is possible for companies to introduce sustainable palm oil across their entire product ranges and that every company can follow suit'.

She added: 'Given the urgency of tackling deforestation and protecting smallholders and local communities, companies must accelerate action across markets and prove they are serious about transforming the palm oil industry so that as consumers we can be confident that the products, we buy aren’t driving deforestation.'