NEVER MADEWITH
UNSUSTAINABLY SOURCED
PALM OIL
WHAT PALM OIL IS
Palm oil is an edible vegetable oil that comes from oil palm trees. Two types of oil can be derived from the fruit; crude palm oil comes from the flesh of the fruit, and palm kernel oil which is derived from the kernel inside the fruit.
WHERE YOU CAN FIND THEM + WHY MADEWITH DOESN’T ALLOW THEM
Palm oil is found in many personal care and beauty products. Cleansing oils, lip treatments, moisturizers, body creams, etc. It’s also found in myriad processed foods and cleaning products on your grocery store shelves.
While palm oil is an excellent ingredient for skincare, harvesting wild palm oil has devastated natural habitats for animals such as orangutans by clear-cutting essential tropical rainforests. Indonesian forests store more carbon than those of Brazil, making the deforestation there catastrophic for the environment worldwide. “Palm oil production is said to have been responsible for about 8% of the world’s deforestation between 1990 and 2008.” -BBC [1]
Luckily there are environmentally conscious companies that make products with sustainably sourced palm oil – meaning the palm oil is grown on farms. MADEWITH chooses to offer palm oil in products that have traceable, sustainable sources.
WHERE THEY’RE BANNED OR RESTRICTED
While not banned for beauty products, the European Union has decided to ban palm oil use in producing petroleum products [2].
WHERE WE'RE GETTING OUR INFORMATION
[1] BBC. What is palm oil and why is it thought to be bad? (2018). https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/39492207
[2] European Parliament. Palm oil and deforestation of rainforests European Parliament resolution of 4 April 2017 on palm oil and deforestation of rainforests. (2017). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52017IP0098&rid=7
[3] Roundtable On Sustainable Palm Oil. Criteria and Certification. https://rspo.org/certification#how-certification-works
[4] NIH. NCBI. R. Russell M. Paterson and Nelson Lima. Climate change affecting oil palm agronomy, and oil palm cultivation increasing climate change, require amelioration. (2018). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5756879
[5] Orangutan Foundation International. The Effects of Palm Oil on Orangutans. https://orangutan.org/rainforest/the-effects-of-palm-oil
