Dubbo is the first major stop after our meeting in Newcastle.
We are camped by the Macquarie River and enjoying the outdoors. We have decided
to spend two days at the Dubbo Zoo, donating a few dollars to conservation and
learning about the work they do there. The Sumatran Tiger catches our eye
partly because neither of us has seen this beautiful big cat in the wild. As we listen to the zookeeper talk, we learn
a little more about how Palm Oil is destroying the habitat of animals such as
the Sumatran Tiger and the Orang-utan.
We learn that Palm Oil is the most widely consumed vegetable
oil on the planet. It is also the highest
yielding vegetable oil but its very efficiency is resulting in the loss of
habitat for animals such as the Sumatran Tiger as land is cleared in Sumatra
and Malaysia to grow more of this crop. I
hadn’t realised that 50-60% of our supermarket products contain palm oil, from
beauty products to pizza dough, packaged bread, detergents, paint and bio
diesel. Most of us are unaware of the
fact that even the shampoos we use daily contain palm oil – check the labelling
for sodium lauryl sulphate.
More recently, some of the growers have committed to growing
Palm Oil more sustainably and you can look for the acronym RSPO (Round Table
for Sustainable Palm Oil) identifying it as having been cultivated in an
ethical manner. We learn there are many
ways to being an informed consumer including installing the Palm Oil Shopping
Guide application on your IPhone. Simply
checking the labelling on the back of the products we buy is not sufficient as
often in Australia Palm Oil may be identified as vegetable oil.
The talk at the zoo brings home to me once again how
important it is to make conscious choices about everything we purchase. While most people would not condone
destroying the habitat of the Sumatran Tiger, by not bothering to understand
the labelling of the products we buy could mean we unwittingly do so. Choices such as this are always left to the
consumer to figure out with little education in the press or media to highlight
the problem. Wouldn’t it be great to have governments implementing serious
policies that ensure we don’t have products on our supermarket shelves that are
destroying the habitats of species such as the Sumatran Tiger?
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