Palm oil, the most widely consumed vegetable oil on the planet, can be found in around half of the products on supermarket shelves—from doughnuts to cosmetics to toothpaste.
But the popular cooking oil’s source, giant palm tree plantations in tropical climates, can be a nightmare for the environment, with palms replacing millions of acres of rainforests in Southeast Asia and Africa. That deforestation is having a devastating impact on endangered species such as Sumatran orangutans and tigers, which rely on the forests for survival, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
The number of plantations in Southeast Asia has tripled in the past decade. That’s because palm oil has a rare combination of useful properties: It stays solid at room temperature like butter does, but has no saturated fat, and unlike the partially hydrogenated oils that replaced butter in many processed foods, it has no trans fats.
Sustainable alternatives to the versatile lipid have been hard to come by, but scientists believe winemakers in South Africa could have the answer. Researchers at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom have been able to turn a type of oily yeast used in wine production into a palm oil alternative.
The yeast, Metschnikowia pulcherrima, can yield up to 20 grams per liter of oil, giving it a lipid profile similar to that of palm oil, The Guardian reported. The yeast can thrive on rapeseed (canola), straw, and even food waste to produce the oil.
The yeast would need between 10 to 100 times less land to produce a similar quantity of oil, Chris Chuck, research fellow at Bath told The Guardian.
“Irrespective of what you are putting in at the start, whether it’s rapeseed, straw, or waste food, M. pulcherrima can use the sugars in it and grow on it,” Chuck said.
While the discovery is a good start, scientists must overcome some hurdles before the yeast is a commercially viable alternative to palm oil. The first is scaling up production to bring down costs. Palm oil sells for between $800 and $900 per metric ton, but the cheapest yeast-derived oil carries a production cost of around $1,200 per metric ton.
The scientists said they think they can make yeast-derived oil competitive with palm oil in three years.
“Technologies [that] can produce usable oil from waste and so don’t compete for dedicated farmland look much more promising, and this work appears to bring one of those technologies closer to reality,” Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace U.K., told The Guardian.
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