09 Mar Making Palm Oil in a Lab. NY Times interviews URP tenant Xylome Leadership
They Want to Make Palm Oil in a Lab. Without Palm Trees.
Palm oil. It’s in your snacks, your soap, pretty much everything. But palm oil plantations have caused vast deforestation. Can these three tech executives help fix things? A handful of startups are trying to reinvent one of the most ubiquitous, but also environmentally destructive, ingredients in our diets.
Palm oil is in bread, instant noodles, Girl Scout cookies, lipstick, Nutella and ice cream, to name a few. People around the world use it to cook daily. But to make all of that oil, endless miles of rainforests worldwide — regions along the Equator vital to biodiversity and the fight against climate change — have been flattened and burned and turned into palm oil plantations. That’s had deadly consequences for species like orangutans in Indonesia.