Our position on palm oil
The palm oil industry has a significant impact on valuable forest regions around the world. As part of Plan A, we're committed to using only the most sustainable sources of palm oil in M&S products.
M&S is actually a very small user of palm oil (the amount we use is less than 1% of the palm oil imported into the UK). However, we know we can only drive global change and achieve our Plan A goals by working in conjunction with other major users.
Our priority is to avoid using palm oil unless it is absolutely necessary for the quality of a product, and to use alternatives to palm oil wherever possible. This is the case with our coated fish range, e.g. fish fingers, where we use rapeseed oil.
As an active member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), we’re encouraging our sources and industry partners to adopt the RSPO standard.
By 2015, we aim to use only 100% fully traceable, certified sustainable palm oil – but , of course, we’ll review this timetable regularly, to take into account global availability of certified sustainable palm oil and its derivatives. We have a database in place which enables us to track the use of palm oil across all of our M&S products.
We have now also purchased GreenPalm certificates to cover 100% of our palm oil use in M&S products. GreenPalm is a certificate trading programme which is designed to tackle the environmental and social problems created by the production of palm oil. GreenPalm works by enabling a financial premium to be earned by producers who can prove they are environmentally and socially responsible, and who develop plans to continually improve their operations. Thus, by selling products covered by the GreenPalm programme, we are rewarding palm oil producers for working in a sustainable and responsible way.
We believe it is vitally important that we send encouraging signals to the market, and GreenPalm certificate trade will help to support and promote the production of sustainable palm oil.
During our move to sustainable sources of palm oil, we’ll make sure that there’s never any compromise on the safety, quality and value of any of our products. We’ll also clearly label all our products containing oil (something we started back in December 2007), so the type of oil is identified – palm, rapeseed etc. Blends of oils are labelled as vegetable oils.
Our work on palm oil ties in with our partnership with the WWF, in particular our support of their conservation work in the Heart of Borneo region. This project aims to work with Malaysian, Indonesian and Brunei governments to end deforestation and to create incentives to make forests more valuable standing. The project will rehabilitate over 120 acres of forest - and work with forestry and plantation management companies to obtain sustainable certification for their practice. In addition to the wildlife corridor which has already been created, by 2011 a further 247 acres of damaged rainforest in the Heart of Borneo will be restored. Vital new activities to monitor and protect the local orang-utan population will also be implemented.
Click here to find out more about the work of WWF.
www.wwf.org.uk
*M&S food products made with certified sustainable palm oil
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