A blog from University of Borås

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

On the backyard of Palm Oil industries

If you fly nowadays in Indonesia or Malaysia, you will see frequent flight cancellation because of hazy weather. It is the end of dry season and forest burning is named as the main reason. As you might know, these countries produce more than 90% of palm oil in the world. Indonesia that dominates the market, has about 1,000 palm oil mills to produce CPO. However, it seems nobody cares about their environmental aspects. These industries benefit of forest fires. In addition, they produce millions tons of wastewater (POME) that is not treated properly and also the open fruit bunches (OPEFB) that is dumped to self composting and burning to terrible fog and smell and also the palm fibers that is burned improperly to create a black exhaust gas. I just put a photo that I took from one of these mills that is not the worst.

It is just not sustainable and this industry needs a better attention probably internationally to stop damaging the tropical forests, and environment for millions of people in this region.

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