Ethical Sourcing of Palm Fiber for Sustainable Packaging

A few weeks ago I was invited to contribute our Earthcycle story to the “Trailblazers for Good” blog on the Care2.com site. It sparked a variety of interesting comments and questions on the palm oil industry which I will address in this and the next few blog posts. Let’s start with the question of where we source our raw fiber material.

More than 70 percent of palm oil is derived from plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, where the first palm trees were planted in the 1800’s. Earthcycle’s products are made from a waste product of the palm oil industry. Specifically, our packaging material is a moulded pulp product made from the husks where the palm fruit grows.

Before founding Earthcycle Packaging, I lived in South East Asia for 15 years where I became well aware of the destructive tendencies of industrial agriculture and the impact excessive demand was having on the natural world. It is well known that there are some areas that have been desecrated and we do not condone it – as such, we have veered away from doing business (licensing technology, sourcing raw material) from areas of the world that don’t have a mindset toward sustainability or don’t have the wherewithal to invest in RSPO certification.

We chose our suppliers of palm fiber carefully and also became an early member of the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The RSPO is a unique organization, bringing together groups that would normally be on opposite sides of the table, to define and certify sustainability in the palm oil industry. Members of the RSPO include social and environmental NGO’s, grassroots organizations and members along the entire supply chain—plantation owners, millers, traders, retailers and financiers. The RSPO agreed on a set of Principles and Criteria for the Production of Sustainable Palm Oil in 2005, launching the certification system in 2007.

It was important to me to get a third party review done on our Malaysian plantation partners so we commissioned SGS Qualipalm, an authorized auditor for the RSPO to assess our source of palm fiber against the RSPO defined guidelines for land title, High Conservation Value (HCV) areas and agrochemical use.

Based on the SGS Qualipalm report, we can safely say that our partner plantation first planted palm trees in 1976, and has existing legal documentation for land titles and proof of occupation and use. The location is in an area of Peninsular Malaysia where there are no significant High Conservation Value (HCV) forests or wildlife habitats. No orang-utans were lost in development of the plantation since Peninsular Malaysia has not recorded sittings of orang-utans. Sittings of species protected under Malaysian law on the plantation include monitor lizards, barn owls and forest cats. Also, the assessment confirmed that there has been no conversion of Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs) to oil palm as per Malaysia’s National Plan. Issues of HCVF are minimal since current activities do not involve clearing of natural areas.

The quest for sustainability is a journey—if we were all perfect, there would be no need for the certification in the first place. So, it is expected that there are areas in the plantation management that need improvement as measured against the RSPO Principles and Criteria.

There is still much work to be done and I’m committed to working with our current and any future partners to help them improve best practices in their operations.