One Year Later in a Hot, Flat, Crowded World:
7 – Lush Cosmetics, Nestle Fight Deforestation


A surprising fact found in Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded: the global use of wood for fuel, and the burning/clearing of forests for cultivation, still contributes more CO2 to the atmosphere than emissions from all transportation systems around the world.

This is an energy poverty problem, an environmental problem, a climate change problem, and a biodiversity problem. It is also increasingly becoming a corporate public relations problem, another of the author’s predictions.

Friedman reports in his book on regions in Indonesia and Brazil where uncoordinated subsistence and business uses of forest areas are causing economic and ecological disasters. Businesses are rapidly planting oil palm plantations in the tropics, clearing vast forest areas to do so. Palm oil (from “oil palms”) is used in food and non-food products, including biofuels.

Here in Glendale, California, retailer Lush Cosmetics used sustainability issues with oil palm plantations in a new marketing campaign for its palm oil-free soap.

A few weeks earlier, Nestle Corporation was featured in a news story as one of several companies seeking to buy palm oil that is “environmentally friendly.” According to the Wall Street Journal article, the companies support the goals of the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The Journal article cited problems with both the price premium and uniform standards for sustainably produced palm oil, but gave special mention to Nestle and other large companies for their efforts.

RSPO’s website says that 28 million tons of palm oil is used for food and non-food products each year, and from the 1990s to the present time,

the area under palm oil cultivation has increased by about 43%…in Malaysia and Indonesia, the world’s largest producers of palm oil.

…there is serious concern that not all palm oil is being produced sustainably at present. Development of new plantations has resulted in the conversion of large areas of forests with high conservation value and has threatened the rich biodiversity in these ecosystems. Use of fire for preparation of land for oil palm planting has been reported to contribute to the problem of forest fires in the late 1990s. The expansion of oil palm plantations has also given rise to social conflicts between the local communities and project proponents in many instances.