How Green are your Easter Eggs?

Easter is almost upon us.

There’s a fact that people who are concerned with the environment don’t know.

Many Easter eggs contain palm oil.

Some comes from sustainable suppliers, some eggs don’t have it; but there are disreputable brands available on the market.

Easter eggs rated by palm oil use

Lindt, Thorntons and Guylian come bottom of a league table of chocolate Easter eggs scored on use of unsustainable palm oil

Chocolate Easter eggs on sale in a supermarket. Photograph: Kevin Britland/Alamy

Lindt, Thorntons and Guylian have come bottom of a green ranking of Easter eggs based on their use of palm oil. Divine Chocolate came top, with the Co-operative and Sainsbury’s close behind in the survey of more than 70 brands by Ethical Consumer magazine and charity Rainforest Foundation UK (RFUK).

The organisations are launching a campaign in response to the increasing threat that unsustainable palm oil is posing to the world’s rainforests, their indigenous wildlife, and the people whose livelihoods depend on the forests. Having destroyed vast areas of forest in countries such as Indonesia, palm oil companies are now planning to expand in the rainforests of the Congo Basin in Africa.

Consumers are unaware of palm oil content, the campaign says, because of current labelling laws. Palm oil is a key ingredient in many food products – including chocolate and biscuits – but companies are not required by EU law to label products containing it until December 2014.

The aim of the campaign is to encourage consumers to buy the best-rated products, forcing those companies that are not taking their environmental responsibilities seriously to use more sustainably sourced palm oil.

Divine and Booja-Booja were deemed to have the best overall credentials, with neither using any palm oil in their chocolate products. Traidcraft, Co-operative Food and Sainsbury’s also scored very highly.

The bottom three chocolate companies were deemed to be Lindt, Thorntons and Guylian. Lindt reportedly supplied inaccurate figures to Ethical Consumer, while Thorntons and Guylian failed to submit any documentation to the organisations that set international sustainable palm oil standards.

Cadbury – now owned by US company Kraft – had poor scores while stablemate Green & Black’s, well-known for its organic range, did much better.

 

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