Crowdjustice - Help Keep Dangerous Chemicals Out Of Our Food!

11th November 2023

"Farmers are unknowingly spreading substances like asbestos, antibiotics, medicines, pesticides, and chemicals on their land, contaminating their crops," say environmentalists George Monbiot, Georgia Elliott-Smith and Steve Hynd.

They're part of a group called Fighting Dirty which is campaigning to update the law in regard to the amount of chemicals present in sewage sludge (a common fertiliser for farmland).

The group say that "since the 1980s the amount of plastic and nasty chemicals contained in sewage sludge has increased but the rules haven't changed."

Although "3.6m tonnes of the UK's sewage sludge" is being spread on farmland each year, there are currently "no legal limits" on the amount of these chemicals present.

Now Fighting Dirty are taking legal action to keep "microplastics and unknown quantities of dangerous chemicals" out of our soils, streams and food system.

The group say on their case page: "The Environment Agency (EA) has been aware of this problem since 2017 when their own experts warned that the decades-old rules governing sludge spreading were in need of urgent reform to protect human and environmental health.

With your help, we will take the EA and the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to court, demanding they urgently update the decades-old rules for testing and regulating sewage sludge and other landspreading wastes, avoiding toxins from poisoning our environment and our bodies."

Read more here