The environmental and social impacts of different vegetable cooking oils differ across the globe in production and cultivation methods employed by growers. This first installment in a series looks to gain perspective on what consumers and busiensses can do to decide what to do next on their consumptive practices. The story across the production and cultivation methods will help bring together the big picture, and local one, once all is said and done in this series.
For this first piece, Greenspeake has looked at a couple studies pertaining to the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of major commercial operations currently in play at the global level. The LCA was designed to look at the environmental impact from a product or process. The LCA is capable of considering several stages of the life of a product, from the extraction of raw materials to the end of life, which is known as crade to grave. You might hear a lot about cradle to cradle in sustainability writing, more on this in a future post.
For now, a study dubbed “More sustainable vegetable oil: Balancing productivity wtih carbon storage opportunities” looks at some 6,000 producers in 38 countries, using a literature review, and considers a variety of practices in growing and producing some of these oils. In this study, palm, soybean, rapesead and sunflower cooking oil is considered in the LCA. The authors state that, the 2022 study considered some 71% of the global production of vegetable oil industry.
The carbon emission equivalents calculated in the 2022 study revealed that the median emissions were lowest for rapeseed at 2.49 kilogram of CO2e per kilogram of refined oil, which was at the lowest end. On the top end was 4.25 kilogram of CO2e per kilogram of soybean cooking oil. The median GHG emissions from this study on sunflower seed oil is 2.94 kilograms of CO2e per kilogram of oil, just above rapeseed. For palm oil, there are a variety of considerations as we’ll explore in this series. For this study, in particular, and looking at the median GHG emissions across the LCA perspective in this study under question, the GHG emissions are dependent on if methane capture technology is used and on the soil type used, according to the study under question. The study considered the years 2000 to 2020 for its comparisons.
Another point to remember is that the researhers considered everything from land use and cultivation and harvesting, along with processing and transport to processing facilities, but they didn’t consider later processes such as packaging and distribution and use of the product for an LCA perspective. Researchers said this had little reporting data available and was highly variable.
In another study, “Life cycle assessment of five vegetable oils,” authors consider all the same oils, palm oil, soybean oil, rapeseed oil, and sunflower oil, but also add peanut oil to the mix. It’s major findings, on impact of global warming, was that rapeseed and sunflower oil perform the best. Soybean and palm were in the next set of higher impacts with peanut oil being the most impactful on global warming. This is all similar to the findings from the first study for the most part. We’ll break down the differences further in the next post where we’ll talk about water consumption and land use and why it’s so important.