I HAVE long harboured a quiet ambition – not the trumpet-blowing kind of social media, but a stubborn wish to explain palm oil without frightening flow charts or reviving science trauma.
For years, I kept saying, “One day.” One day I would make mills and their processes sound less like punishment and more like common sense – because when jargon steps aside, understanding finally walks in.
Well, one day arrived. So I rolled up my sleeves and served palm oil milling sunny-side up, by doing something mildly mischievous: imagining that we are the oil palm fruit bunches themselves.
Think of this as my overdue school essay – decades late, considerably oilier, and titled Aku, Setandan Sawit.
No lab coat required. Just curiosity, a sense of humour, and a willingness to see sustainability through the eyes of a very hardworking fruit bunch
Life on the tree
Once upon a time, I was an oil palm fresh fruit bunch – spiky, heavy, and hanging proudly from an oil palm like a trophy that knew its own worth.
I was a compact universe of abundance, made up of thousands of tightly packed, oval-shaped fruits, each quietly storing its share of promise.
Sunlight filtered in. Rain arrived on schedule.
Fertilisers nourished me, and photosynthesis went about its quiet, unpaid work. Life was simple. Life was good.
For those more familiar with European landscapes, it may help to think of me the way one thinks of apples or olives: fruits that must be harvested, gathered, and pressed promptly if their juice or oil is to retain its quality.
Oil palm fruit is no different.
At the heart of everything lies my quality and ripeness. No mill, however efficient, can improve on poorly harvested, unripe or overripe fruit. Good oil begins long before the gate on the tree, at the right moment.
Once harvested, time matters. The journey from tree to mill is not about haste, but about respecting the biology of fruit – because the moment I was cut, oil quantity stopped increasing, the clock began ticking, and left too long, my oil quality would quietly begin to sulk.
Chemistry, unlike humans, does not forgive procrastination. Enzymes do not care for excuses. That is why mills insist on prompt processing.
The urgency is not about haste, but about preserving oil quality before enzymes have the chance to undo months of careful growth.
This is not greed; it is discipline – the kind that respects biology and works with it, not against it.
And so, with dignity intact and destiny calling, my journey to the mill began, joined by countless other fruit bunches from nearby fields and from many different growers across the surrounding landscape, all converging toward the same careful purpose.
Inside the mill: A bunch’s journey
The mill has a reputation problem. Many imagine it as a dark, smoky beast – all noise and mystery. From the inside, however, most mills are nothing of the sort.
They are carefully choreographed systems, where every step and every attendant knows their role, and nothing moves without purpose.
My journey began at the weighbridge. I was graded for quality, measured, recorded and acknowledged. Not because the mill worships numbers, but because accountability matters.
You cannot manage what you do not measure – and in this world, every tonne tells a story.
Then came sterilisation. Not violence, but steam. I was rolled into a giant steel vessel, rather like a pressure cooker, and bathed in hot, sauna, pressurised steam.
This did three things at once: it switched off enzymes that would otherwise spoil the oil, softened the fruits so they loosened their grip on the bunch, and prepared everything for what came next.
Heat, here, was not aggression; it was preparation – a firm handshake between engineering and biology.
After steaming came what is commonly called threshing – though I prefer the gentler term fruitlet separation.
Inside a rotating drum, gravity and motion persuaded the fruits to let go.
This was not shredding; more like tumbling clothes in a dryer until loose coins fall out of pockets. The fruitlets moved on.
My now-empty structure exited as an empty fruit bunch, already destined for a second life as mulch or fuel.
As loose fruits, we entered the digester – warm, stirred, gently mashed. This was persuasion, not punishment.
Oil-bearing cells were ruptured while steam kept everything supple. Nothing left the system here; everything flowed forward. Engineers call this a closed loop.
Next came the screw press, the mill’s economic heartbeat.
Mechanical pressure was applied – chemical-free, honest work. Out flowed crude palm oil mixed with water and fine solids on one side, and press cake of fibre and nuts on the other.
The thick liquid moved on through screening, where coarse fibres were removed and politely returned upstream.
Losses here rarely come from design; they come from poor housekeeping.
Palm oil mills, like kitchens, reveal character in how clean their floors are.
Then came clarification, one of the mill’s most elegant acts.
In tanks, oil floated while heavier impurities settled. Temperature, water, time and gravity did the work.
Where gravity was not enough, centrifuges stepped in – spinning fast enough to recover oil that patience alone could not coax.
Recovered oil returned to the system; sludge moved on to treatment, where even waste began another chapter.
The oil was then purified and dried. Spinning removed fine impurities; vacuum lowered boiling points so moisture escaped gently.
No chemistry. No drama. Just physics doing what it has always done.
Finally, the oil rested in storage tanks, tested daily, kept below critical temperatures.
Discipline mattered here too. Quality is never decided in one step; it is the sum of care shown at every step before it.
Why mills matter for sustainability – As seen by a former fruit bunch
By the time I had passed through the mill - steamed, shaken, pressed and clarified - I realised something important: the mill was never just a processing stop. It was the nerve centre of sustainability in my entire journey.
And here is the quiet surprise: no chemicals were invited to the party. No solvents. No laboratory shortcuts. Just steam, pressure, gravity, and patience doing honest work.
While many annual edible oils begin their lives in a chemical relationship, palm oil, at this stage, is extracted using little more than physics, discipline and respect for the fruit.
From my perspective as a once-hanging fruit bunch, timing mattered. The faster and more efficiently I was processed, the less of me was wasted. Less waste meant more oil recovered from the same land.
And when you get more oil from what you already have, you do not need to clear more land. That is sustainability in its quietest, most effective form - no slogans required.
Then there was resource cycling. Nothing was wasted; everything was renewed. The empty fruit bunches returned nutrients to the soil, closing the loop between field and factory. What looked like leftovers were simply materials waiting for their next role.
Hard palm kernel shells and fibrous mesocarp did not end up as rubbish - they went straight back to work. Burnt as boiler fuel, they generated steam that powered turbines to produce electricity for the mill – and some neighbouring estates.
Even the steam that had done its job was not lost; it was reused for fruit cooking and process heating, keeping the system efficient and self-sustaining.
Some of these shells travel far beyond the plantation, even finding their way to countries like Japan, where they are used in biomass boilers as a renewable energy source.
Empty fruit bunches, too, found new purpose - used as fuel or returned to the field as mulch or compost, enriching the soil.
Even wastewater - known rather ominously as palm oil mill effluent - was not ignored. The released methane could be captured to generate electricity or upgraded into biomethane as a substitute for natural gas.
The mill did not close loops to look virtuous; it did so because wasting resources is bad engineering and worse economics. In this quiet choreography, waste was not an ending but a transition - where yesterday’s waste products became today’s energy, and every leftover found its next role.
In a well-run palm oil mill, efficiency is not a slogan; it is a system that works.
I also noticed how much transparency mattered. At the mill, everything was measured, recorded, and traced. Assuming we have a 100-kg bunch, we can trace everything: empty bunches, fibres, nuts, sludge, steam, condensate - and about 20 kg of oil recovered. From where I was harvested to how much oil I yielded, nothing was left to vague promises.
Mills anchor traceability. Without them, sustainability is an aspiration. With them, it becomes an auditable reality.
And finally, I noticed the people.
The mill was not a faceless machine. It was engineers, technicians, operators, and managers - skilled hands and trained minds - turning agricultural produce into global supply.
It anchored rural economies and connected smallholders to markets far beyond the plantation gate.
Seen from the inside, a well-run mill is not an environmental villain. It is a disciplined neighbour. It rewards good practices, punishes waste, and insists on order - not because it is trendy, but because systems, like ecosystems, only survive when they are well managed.
A closing thought
I wrote this to show that when we speak plainly, mills no longer feel distant or intimidating.
This is a call for clearer communication, not more complexity. Not to turn readers into engineers, but to remove fear.
Palm oil milling is neither mysterious nor complicated. It is logic, timing, restraint and care, practised quietly every day. And if sustainability is truly about wisdom rather than rhetoric, then understanding the mill matters.
So when confusion arises, tell a story. Once upon a time, we were oil palm fruit bunches and we learned that sustainability begins not with slogans, but with systems that work.
Joseph Tek Choon yee has over 30 years experience in the plantation industry,with a strong background in oil palm research and development,C-suite leadership and industry advocacy.The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
