15/07/2010 (Reuters) - More food makers should commit to only using palm oil that is certified as sustainable to help raise environmental standards in the industry, the head of palm oil processor Loders Croklaan Europe said on Wednesday.

Some food groups such as Unilever and Nestle have made pledges to gradually switch to sourcing all palm oil from sustainably certified sources, but many other manufacturers and retailers are yet to follow.

"It could be faster," Loek Favre, chief operating officer at Loders Croklaan Europe, said in an interview.

"There are a number of frontrunners showing a huge commitment to sustainable palm oil, but some other players are really relatively slow. We try to encourage them to speed up their purchasing."

Unilever has pledged to buy only from certified sustainable plantations from 2015, and Nestle has also said it aims to use only certified palm oil by that date.

Loders Croklaan, a subsidiary of Malaysian oil palm planter IOI Corp. , processes more than 1 million tonnes of palm oil annually in Europe, sales director Marc den Hartog said.

By the end of 2010, he expected about 10 percent of the oil processed by the company to be segregated sustainable palm oil, which can be traced through the whole supply chain, partly reflecting the level of demand so far from customers.

Food manufacturers buy about 90 percent of the palm oil processed by Loders Croklaan and use it to make margarine, biscuits, chocolate confectionary and bakery products.

The firm also sells some processed oil to the cosmetics industry, where it is used in creams and gels, and a small amount to the animal feed, technical and biofuels industries.

Palm oil planters in Malaysia and Indonesia are under intense scrutiny from green groups, who have released several reports this year aiming to highlight practices such as rainforest clearing and draining of peatlands.

After key consumers blacklisted some suppliers, IOI also came under the spotlight in March, when it dismissed a report from Friends of the Earth that it cleared rainforests on Borneo island to expand oil palm estates.

So far about a third of IOI's plantations are certified as sustainable by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) industry system, and the company is aiming for all plantations to be certified by the end of 2011, Den Hartog said.