Influencing the Palm Oil Industry

The other day someone asked in response to my story on the “Trailblazers for Good” blog on Care2.com whether or not I would consider influencing and bringing about change in the palm oil industry? Well, the quick and high-level answer is yes – this has been my intention from the beginning – to create change in the industry by helping to create positive role models and economically viable alternatives for the disposal of palm waste. We recently had a discussion with a large palm oil plantation company in Malaysia and they agree that our company “represented the future of the industry.”

We became one of the early members of the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), have volunteered to get a third party review done and verification to ensure the ethical sourcing of our raw palm fiber material, and continue to work with our supplier plantation to make improvements, measuring ourselves against the guidelines of the RSPO among others. And it really goes further than this.

After living in South East Asia for 15 years and returning to Canada, I was looking to develop a business concept that would allow me to not only address and help contribute to the sustainable development of the palm oil industry and a better quality of life and working conditions for those affected by the incineration of palm waste, but to also find a way to simultaneously address North America’s mounting waste problem, and the environmental and health hazards brought on by plastics. This is how Earthcycle Packaging was born!

Lofty goals? Maybe. But for me it is about aligning my values, passion and skills to affect incremental change in the short-term to hopefully inspire and bring about the necessary transformational change in the future.