Eco-solutions

Being Environmentally Responsible

SD Guthrie proudly upholds a Zero-Burning Policy that has been in place since 1985, demonstrating our leadership in sustainability. We have pioneered the Zero-Burning Replanting Technique, which has effectively replaced the outdated slash-and-burn method and set the benchmark for environmentally responsible oil palm replanting.

Zero-Burning Replanting Techniques

• The act of open burning is dangerous for our environment, property, and community safety. In fact, open burning is one of the main causes of the annual haze issue in Southeast Asia that has affected all of us.
• It poses a business risk for companies like ours that have invested time and effort to cultivate our estates.
• SD Guthrie has had a Zero Burning Policy for over three decades and we commercially introduced the Zero-burning Replanting Technique to replace the traditional slash-and-burn method of clearing land.
• It has become the most environmentally friendly standard of clearing land for oil palm replanting today.
• The technique won the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Global 500 Roll of Honour for Environmental Achievement at the Rio Earth Summit 1992.

Click here to find out more about our Zero-burning policy and haze management initiative.

Preserving our Soil, Reducing our Carbon Footprint and Practicing Sustainable Pest Management

Our priority has always been about protecting our assets from the ground up, and this includes preserving the nutrients in our soil to encourage organic microbial growth for healthier palm fruits. That means we need to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertiliser and pesticides wherever possible. By doing this, we also reduce our carbon footprint and create a safer working environment for our field staff.

Our Crop Protection Research Section has developed pest and disease control methods that are environmentally friendly and economically viable to protect our palms. We utilise biological controls to create an ecosystem in our palm oil plantations that functions to regulate itself. Our Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach, as we call it, is employed across all our palm oil plantations.

Barn Owls

Meet our most celebrated resident at the plantations, Tyto alba! We build nesting boxes every 10 hectares in our estates to encourage these barn owls to populate the plantation. These cute tenants help manage the rat population in our estates, our most common pest. This has enabled us to significantly reduce rat infestations, which means fewer rounds of rat baiting and less damage to our fruit bunches.

Beneficial Plants

While driving along our estates, visitors will notice strips of attractive plants at the fringe of each oil palm row. These plants have been planted with the intention to curb the population of the bagworm, a leaf-eating caterpillar that damages palm fronds.

By growing these beneficial plants, we encourage the propagation of the bagworm’s natural enemies, predators and parasitoid insects that attack and suppress bagworm outbreaks. Cultivated in the right ratio, these plants protect our oil palms from leaf-eating caterpillar pests within a 120 to 450-metre radius.