Palm oil is present in up to 50% of products on our supermarket shelves, yet there is no requirement for the explicit labelling of palm oil.

Currently companies who use palm oil in their products, are able to disguise it in the ingredients list as “Vegetable oil”. This is wrong! Product consumers/users should be able to clearly see on the front of packaging (marked by a universal stamp), that the product contains palm oil. This allows the buyer to think twice about purchasing this product or if they want to choose something else that does not contain palm oil.

What’s so bad about Palm Oil?

Dirty palm oil is harmful for living species. Rainforest for us might be the ‘lungs of the planet’, but for some species it is also their home, rapidly evaporating due to excessive deforestation. As a result, the animal and plant life has decimated, most notably in Indonesia and Malaysia, bringing some species like the Orangutan, Sumatran Elephant, Tiger and Rhino close to extinction. It also effects human lives; even though palm oil industry provides a solution to poverty for some, it has caused many people to lose their land without consultation or compensation and left them deprived of the possibility to grow food and build homes from forest materials as they have been doing for decades.

Palm oil is bad for health. It is very high in saturated fat causing heart disease, liver dysfunction, obesity and type 2 diabetes. Also, burning rainforest not only causes greenhouse gas emissions but fills the air with dense smoke, causing respiratory problems.

Change:

It’s time for change.
We should be able to clearly see a universal stamp on the front of all products containing palm oil stating "This product contains Palm Oil", which will allow consumers/users to reconsider if they should be using this product or look for a better and more sustainable alternative product.

Sign this petition and share it around, in the hopes of being able to be one step closer to this change happening.