Sustainability Tips for the Week of October 27th - October 31st: 

Are Your Halloween Treats Hiding a Scary Secret?
(Hint: It's palm oil!)
 

As we have for the past few years, the Michael Schwartz Library Sustainability Team will be sending out some sustainability tips each week of October, Campus Sustainability Month. Here are this week's tips!

When it comes to Halloween, the scariest thing might not be the ghosts and goblins at your door, but the palm oil hiding in your favorite candies. Palm oil is in everything from chocolates to chewy sweets, and it’s a major driver of rainforest destruction, putting endangered species like orangutans, tigers, and rhinos at real risk.​

Palm oil can be found in products ranging from shampoo, to Nutella, to Oreos.  Mostly grown in the rainforests of Indonesia, Borneo, and other tropical regions, the equivalent of 300 football fields of rainforest are destroyed every hour to make way for palm oil plantations in these areas. Currently, deforestation causes 80% of Indonesia's carbon emissions, and the country is the third largest emitter in the world. 

Besides being globally devastating because of the important role the rainforest plays in diverting climate change, this deforestation also destroys the biodiversity of these areas and puts animals like the Bornean orangutan and the Sumatran tiger at imminent risk of extinction. Finally, the palm oil industry has been linked to accusations of human rights abuse, mostly because of their illegal methods of slashing and burning forests, putting the people who live in the region at risk and ruining their livelihoods.  Clearly, the harvesting of palm oil is causing a serious crisis. 

But good news—this story comes with a sweet twist! 
Happily, the news is not all grim. You don’t have to ghost your favorite treats to help forests and wildlife survive.​  Check out the resources listed below, which include lists of responsibly sourced candy: 

As you can see, there are many familiar options that don't contain palm oil, and we can continue to send the message to manufacturers that using palm oil is not okay by avoiding products with that ingredient whenever possible. Note: there are some products that claim to contain “sustainable palm oil”. It can be difficult to know how reliable these claims are, so it's usually best to just avoid palm oil in products all together.

Thanks for helping to make our campus (and your home) more sustainable!   

-This week's tips compiled by Mandi Goodsett, Performing Arts & Humanities Librarian, Michael Schwartz Library