Found in everything from chips to toothpaste, our addiction to palm oil is destroying rainforests. But an alternative may be on the horizon—oil made from microbes
However, an alternative to palm oil may be on the horizon, one that’s just as multifaceted but not as fraught: oil made from microbes.Scientists began looking into alternative sources for obtaining edible oil out of necessity, says Philipp Arbter, a biotechnologist at the Technical University of Hamburg in Germany.
But interest in microbial oils—those made from yeast, as well as other microorganisms like algae—has seen a revival in recent years as an eco-friendly substitute for palm oil, one that appears more viable than other vegetable oils. , one of a handful of emerging startups that are growing and tweaking microbes to produce a synthetic version of palm oil.As an oil, palm is hard to beat. For a start, it’s an extremely efficient crop—the reason why it’s so cheap compared with other oils. An acre of oil palms—the trees that grow the fruit palm oil is made from—can produce more than, at least six times more than other edible oils.
Those attributes make finding a suitable substitute somewhat of a holy grail, though microbial oil, with a lipid profile similar to palm oil, might just be up to the task.
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