Clean and palm oil-free living.

Never one to shy from a challenge, commencing with soap and cleaning products seemed like a sensible choice - not least due to the lack of body wash and laundry detergent in the household.

A trip to my local supermarket of choice (a locally-owned Foodland, rather than corporation owned Woolworths or Coles) was both productive and frustrating:

1. Laundry detergent: surprisingly easy. For a product that is not eaten, labelling on laundry detergents surprised me, as ingredients are clearly listed. Of course, as is usually the case for palm oil-derived ingredients, deciphering names was going to be necessary.

Or so I thought: third item I picked up, Aware Eco Choice, prominently states on the front of the packaging that it does not contain palm oil:

A visit to the product's FAQ makes it even clearer:

Do the powders use any PALM OIL derived ingredients?
No - we are happy to announce, that we now source the primary Surfactant (detergent agent) used in the Aware laundry powders from coconut oil. While Aware Environmental Ltd (Orange Power and Aware’s parent company) and Planet Ark currently support the intentions of the ‘Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil’ (visit www.rspo.org for more info) it is our opinion that the production of palm oil will never be sustainable. Should large international companies, who chair the RSPO, demonstrate the responsible sourcing of palm oil in the future, it will not work to decrease the total demand for the product. Even if a sustainable palm oil product was developed the demand for it would continue to grow and place additional pressure on forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, not to mention new supply countries like Columbia. Coconut Oil is a sound alternative to use as a base for surfactants as it does not represent the same immediate and critical threat to rainforest habitats.

In contrast, other laundry products that claim to be good for the environment use palm oil-derived ingredients and are therefore very bad for the environment. Avoid them at all cost.

2. Body wash/soap: not a single product. Every single item contained palm oil. I am clearly not going to be able to purchase soap at a supermarket. This is going to require some more research.

Where to start with the palm oil purge?

The goal is easy: eliminating palm oil from my life. The path to doing so is not as easy. The challenges that I face:

• Identifying palm oil as an ingredient. As outlined previously, this isn't as easy as it ought to be. However, lists of products that are free of palm oil do exist;
• I currently share a house with two other people, neither of who is passionate about the issue. Whilst I can control what is bought collectively whilst I am shopping, I have no say over what they buy for the three of us;
• Working out where to buy palm oil-free products. Whilst palm oil-free chocolate is easy to find (hint: avoid Nestle as a starting point), finding cleaning products and personal hygiene items is more of a challenge; and
• Deciding what to do when I have no control over what I consume or any way to determine what path I should take.

There are a couple of concessions that I am making on the way to a palm oil-free lifestyle:

• I am not throwing anything away that I purchased previously because it contains palm oil. Whilst the goal may be a palm oil-free lifestyle, unnecessary waste along the way is not acceptable. I shall use up what I have purchased previously and vow to never buy said product again (unless it also makes the transition to a palm oil-free form); and
• Dining out: it is not necessarily possible to always determine beforehand whether a restaurant uses palm oil; in cases in which it is known, such places shall be avoided. When it is not known, highlighting the issue with the staff will be done, and if there is no interest in the matter, then the restaurant will not be frequented again in the future. I accept that this will not always be possible to control and that being completely rigid on this will be impossible (especially when travelling), but for local restaurants that I choose to frequent on a regular basis it is a realistic option.

Putting one's money where one's mouth is is an important aspect of pursuing a palm oil-free existence. Signing a petition to demand to better labelling of products is meaningless if business does not learn that consumers do care about what they consume and will support those businesses that are willing to no longer use palm oil- and boycott those that refuse to change.

Why avoid palm oil?

Palm oil consumption worldwide is expected to double from 2000 to 2030, and triple by 2050. Currently over 70% of palm oil is used in food products, but the demand of biofuels is likely to drive demand further.

But why avoid it? Here's why:

(Forest converting to palm oil, source: bosf_uk)

(Smoke from peat fire, source: bosf_uk)

(Starving female found in palm oil plantation, source: bosf_uk)

Identifying palm oil: not as easy as it sounds.

It may not sound difficult - to remove palm oil completely from one's life. But it is. One has to first identify as what it is listed in the ingredients of a product. More often than not (in Australia, at least), palm oil is not labelled as 'palm oil'. Due to the bad publicity that palm oil receives, it is usually not listed as such. Instead, ingredients such as:

• Vegetable oil;
• Vegetable fat;
• Emulsifier E471;
• Sodium laureth sulphate;
• Sodium lauryl sulphate;
• Sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS or NaDS);
• Palmate;
• Palm oil kernel;
• Palmitate;
• Elaeis guineensis;
• Glyceryl stearate;
• Stearic acid;
• Steareth-2;
• Steareth-20;
• Sodium lauryl sulfoacetate;
• Hydrated palm glycerides;
• Sodium isostearoyl lactylaye;
• Cetyl palmitate and octyl palmitate; and
• Anything with palmitate in the name.

May actually be (and in most cases, almost certainly is) palm oil. Generally speaking, if something isn't palm oil (such as oil), it is listed using its real name ('canola oil', not 'vegetable oil', for instance).

Some organisations estimate that up to 40% of all supermarket items contain palm oil (or its derivatives) and that Australians each consume, on average, 10kg annually.

Everything from chocolate to cooking oil, biscuits to washing powder, and soap to fruit juice may contain palm oil. When palm oil is hidden behind so many names, spotting it is not always an easy exercise. This is the challenge.

Living without palm oil.

It's been a while, but I'm back (as if anybody has noticed).

For the last couple of months I have been endeavouring to rid my life, once and for all, of one of the most evil of ingredients used in so much of what we consume, palm oil. In the past, I've noticed that palm oil has even made its way into fruit juice, all in the name of health, and whilst I have sought to avoid purchasing anything that contains it, to completely avoid it takes a lot of effort - and planning.

Inspired by my involvement in the World Tapir Day activities at the Adelaide Zoo, I have now undertaken to remove palm oil completely from my life.

A riot of my own

Libya. Land of the Colonel. Soon to be my home for the next couple of days.

I'm sitting in the Lufthansa lounge at Frankfurt Airport, waiting for my flight to Tripoli, capital of Libya, and showpiece of an African dictator that makes the majority of other uniform-wearing, crazy hat-wearing meglomaniacs look positively sane and balanced. That's not to say that Colonel Gaddafi does not get it right on some occasions - it is just that those occasions in which he does succeed in making a valid point have more to do with the laws of probability than with any insight on his part.

This morning I departed one state - the United Kingdom - that, whilst ostensibly democratic, has become a surveillance state. Cameras dominate the landscape, pointing down from every vantage point, recording the minutae of life. All in the name of security and safety. Yet, as the suicide bombings on the Moscow subway system have made accutely plain, no amount of video footage makes a difference. Just as it made no difference one day in July a few years ago in the British capital.

And so I sit here, in the Lufthansa lounge, weissbier standing alongside my laptop, knowing that I am being filmed. From somewhere. I cannot see the camera, but I'm at an airport, so there must be a camera watching me. I just cannot see it. Or does having access to the business lounge of Germany's largest carrier remove one from the scrutiny of the all-seeing eyes?

Either way, I bet that there aren't many cameras in Tripoli. I may be about to travel to a country in which I will understand very little, have about as much comprehension of daily life as I will its language, but I will not be filmed in most locations. And will, inevitably, most likely be a lot safer than I ever was in London during the last few days.

This isn't to say that I felt particularly unsafe in London - being a 6'2" skinhead probably means that I am not an obvious candidate for a mugging or stabbing - both of which apparently occur with fantastically high frequency, if the free daily paper is to be believed. A teenager was chased and stabbed to death at Victoria Station last week, I have read. And nobody prevented it from occurring. Not even the surveillance cameras. But fear not, British population, the perpetrators were caught on CCTV and some of them have now been arrested. Including at least one teenage girl. Look how the world has deteriorated - even teenage girls, dressed in school uniforms, are involved in the bullying and murder of an immigrant teenager.

None of this means that the North African dictator, head of state of my intended destination, has got it right either. But on the other hand, has he got it so completely wrong? I don't know. Maybe I will by the end of Thursday.

And that message circles in my mind. White riot, I wanna riot. White riot, a riot of my own.

101 Walterton Road

A couple of days ago I spent the afternoon walking around West London, through an area that I don't really know the name of - Croydon, Putney, something along those lines. The name is irrelevant. Walterton Road, Elgin Avenue, Chippenham Road. I knew why I was there.

34 years ago, the area was replete with urban decay, squats dominating the streetscape. The Westway, the A-somethingorother motorway, races through the middle of it, as it did in the mid-1970s, and the district is home to immigrant communities, as it was back then. To the south, the areas of Chelsea and Kensington stand in stark contrast to the district to the north of them.

In the mid-1970s, a call went out from one of those squats - I wanna riot, a riot of my own. The squats have long since gone, demolished to make way for gated, semi-gentrified estates and council tenancies. The call to action has long since passed - as has the agitator calling for British youth to stand up. Its echo remains in the back catalogue of a multinational record label, making money for faceless corporations.

As I walked those streets, under the watchful eye of the camera, I wondered where the spirit of 1976 had gone. Me, a non-working class skinhead from Australia in his late thirties and employed in a well paid, white collar job, on a nostalgia tour of something to which he has no direct connection. Hardly a stellar example of the message that eminated out of the squats of Walterton Road.

Yet, as I walked through this area of West London, I was surrounded by people and locations that had even less of a connection with the message of 1976 than did I. the all-seeing eye peers down on them, they grumble, in the best of British tradition, about the weather, the economy, unemployment, the cost of living. Oblivious to the legacy of the area in which they live, and unwilling to challenge their lot in life.

Joe, you are sorely missed.