The Environmental Cost of your Halloween Candy
With Halloween drawing near, it is important to understand what is in your candy. When looking at the ingredient list, palm oil should be a red flag, telling you to avoid this trick and choose a different treat.
Image: Halloween candy spill out of orange trick or treat bucket from stock.adobe.com
What is the Problem with Palm Oil?
Palm oil is a product that is hard to avoid in your day-to-day life. You can find it in numerous everyday products such as candy, detergent, and shampoo. Unfortunately, palm oil, made from oil palm, has a multitude of production related issues. This article will focus on the ecological impacts, but it is necessary to recognize that production also creates human rights issues such as child labor and worker exploitation. On the environmental side, palm oil production has caused numerous problems, with the two most devastating being deforestation and biodiversity loss.
Deforestation
Due to high demand, oil palm, originating in Africa, is currently grown in large quantities in Southeast Asia, where yields are generally higher. It is typically grown as a monoculture but can survive with mixed vegetation in various soils. Oil palm needs wide open spaces for the maximized growth and profitability, leading to the formation of palm plantations responsible for deforestation and forest encroachment. For example new plantations were a source of ~50% of deforestation from 1972-2015 in Malaysian Borneo.
Figure: a) contribution of oil pal to overall deforestation b) percentage of all oil palm expansion that cleared forest (From Meijaard, E., Brooks, T.M., Carlson, K.M. et al. (2020)
The data above, built on findings from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, demonstrates that globally oil palm growth is not a large cause of deforestation. However, in the cases of countries that harvest oil palm, like Malaysia and Indonesia, there is a precedent indicating oil palm as a primary driver of deforestation from 1972 to 2015. Peru alongside Malaysia and Indonesia is also highly impacted by oil palm plantations due to oil palm expansion, where oil palm forests replace the natural regenerating closed canopy forests.
Biodiversity loss
Biodiversity in natural forests is greatly lowered by the presence of oil palm plantations for almost every taxonomic group. Plant diversity is the hardest hit, with palm oil forests showing only 1% of the diversity levels of a natural forest. Mammal diversity is the second hardest hit with the diversity being 47-90% lower depending on proximity. The presence of palm plantations especially affects the mammalian forest specialists who are influential to conservation.
The reason for this diversity loss is that oil palm is invasive, and brings along with it other invasive species. This means it overtakes resources from native populations, over-competing and decimating species who cannot adapt to these resource changes.The figure below, developed from the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species Assessments, demonstrates just how many species are threatened by palm oil production, with the previously discussed mammals and plants being impacted the most, with birds following close behind.
Figure: Species groups with more than eight threatened species with the terms 'palm oil' or 'oil palm' in the threat texts of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species Assessments (Meijaard, E., Brooks, T.M., Carlson, K.M. et al. 2020)
Why should I care?
Readers who do not live in a country that grows palm oil are most likely wondering how this issue affects them. But, who is demanding all this palm oil be made? Who is causing the issue? The answer to that is the companies who make your candies and bread and detergent. In buying these products, we are complicite to the perpetuation of an issue that is preventable.
What can I do?
As consumers, we must acknowledge the issue and try to only purchase products that contain no palm oil, or are marked with the RSPO logo, indicating the oil palm was grown sustainably.
So, this halloween, ditch the candy corn. Instead, check out this link to see what candies will promote a better future, instead of preventing a country's ecosystem from having a future.
Meijaard, E., Brooks, T.M., Carlson, K.M. et al. The environmental impacts of palm oil in context. Nat. Plants 6, 1418–1426 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-020-00813-w
This is not only an interesting topic but it is also very relevant to today's world where the climate crisis is the biggest threat to our future. This post easily explains that palm oil is bad because it promotes deforestation and biodiversity loss. Both of these issues are very relevant to today's world as we are facing a global crisis of biodiversity reduction.
ReplyDeleteLove the topic of this post and how well connected it is to the time of year. Carry it on through to Thanksgiving and winter holiday goodies while we’re at it! I think the idea of how forest loss not only impacts climate change, but also biodiversity, does a great job of showing how specific instances of trying to fulfill human “needs” can come to impact our planet in multiple ways. I really like how this blog post gives something of a call to action at the end, encouraging us to find out what candies to avoid since they use palm oil.
ReplyDeleteWow, I had no idea that palm oil was so detrimental to the environment. Many common household products are linked to deforestation, pollution, and are harmful to the environment. It may be hard to keep track, but we should do our best to stay clear from these products, and buy more sustainable or eco-friendly products instead. Unfortunately though, I can never look at Halloween candy the same way again.
ReplyDeleteThe way you structured this piece allowed you to convey your information clearly and directly! The subheadings really helped me process what I was learning, and they conveyed the importance of your topic at every step of the article. I don't think I, or most people, are aware of just how many products contain palm oil. Not to mention the high amount of fossil fuels that must be emitted in the process of exporting palm oil internationally! Good usage of graphs and relevant statistics.
ReplyDeleteComment from Crystal:
ReplyDeleteI never would have thought that palm oil production had such detrimental effects to the environment. I think this is a very important topic that should be acknowledged because of the seriousness of biodiversity loss. I like the use of graphics and the call to action at the end of this piece- I can feel the sense of importance and urgency. The Orangutan Friendly Sustainable Palm Oil Halloween Candy List article was super interesting too!