vegan-and-sara:chasingrainbowsforever: Colors ~ Orange and GreenIf you care about orangutans, plea
vegan-and-sara:chasingrainbowsforever: Colors ~ Orange and Green If you care about orangutans, please join the boycott against palm oil! As the leading driver of the rapid extinction of orangutans, the palm oil industry results in the deaths of up to 5,000 orangutans every year. Richard Zimmerman, director of Orangutan Outreach writes:The cultivation of palm oil over the last decade has directly led to the slaughter of thousands of individuals as the industry has expanded into previously undisturbed areas of old-growth rainforest. The UNEP estimates that an area of Indonesian rainforest the size of six football fields is cut down every minute of every day. Read that sentence again.The palm oil and timber industries are guilty of truly horrific ecological atrocities… When the forest is cleared, adult orangutans are generally shot on sight. In the absence of bullets they are beaten, burned, tortured, mutilated and often eaten as bushmeat. Babies are literally torn off their dying mothers so that they can be sold on the black market as illegal pets to wealthy families, who see them as status symbols of their own power and prestige. This is not hyperbole, mind you. It has been documented time and time again.While some organizations promote “ethical palm”, this label is misleading. The only certifying body is the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), and companies can join this organization without actually implementing its standards on their own plantations. What’s worse, a 2019 study found that “sustainable” palm plantations actually deforested at a rate higher than non-sustainable ones. According to the study’s lead author, Roberto Gatti:Our research shows quite unequivocally that, unfortunately, there is no way to produce sustainable palm oil that did not come from deforestation, and that the claims by corporations, certification schemes and non government organisations are simply ‘greenwashing’, useful to continue business as usual. No shortcuts: if you use palm oil, certified or not, you are definitely destroying tropical forests.Palm oil is ubiquitous in many food, cosmetic, and cleaning products in the West. It can also sneak into products under the names “sodium laureth” or “lauryl sulphate”. All it takes is a couple of seconds to check the list of ingredients to make sure you aren’t supporting this industry. The most common rebuttal to the palm boycott is that alternative oils may use more land or resources than palm. But this isn’t a good reason to abandon the boycott, as you can stop buying palm oil without replacing it with any other unsustainable oil.For the sake of orangutans and vital tropical rainforest ecosystems, boycott palm oil as much as possible! -- source link
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