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Pesticides Pollution
PESTICIDES POLLUTION
Pesticides are chemicals that are used to kill or control pests. This includes herbicides that are used for getting rid of weeds, insecticides used to treat fungicides, nematocides used to control nematodes as well as rodenticides used to treat vertebrate poisoning.
WHY PESTICIDES CAN BE HARMFUL
Pesticides contain ingredients such as oxygen, chlorine, sulfur, phosphorus, nitrogen, and bromine as well as heavy metals such as arsenic, copper sulfates, lead, and mercury. Pesticides, being toxic chemicals, can interfere with the environment and cause harms in several ways.
When applied on agricultural lands and domestic gardens, they run off these lands and come in contact with natural resources.
HOW DOES IT POLLUTE THE ENVIRONMENT?
This normally occurs when heavy wind or rain falls on the aforementioned lands, spreading the pesticides, being toxic chemicals, into unintended areas, coming in contact with natural resources such clean air, water, land, plants, and animals, thereby contaminating or harming them.
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER CONTAMINATION?
Once the aforementioned natural resources are contaminated or harmed by pesticides, they are deemed unsuitable and harmful to the environment as well as to people and communities.
WHAT ARE THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF PESTICIDES POLLUTION?
Some of the environmental impacts associated with the indiscriminate use of pesticides are listed and briefly explained below;
Biodiversity Destruction: The soil contains small naturally occurring organisms know as microbes. They break down organic materials in the soil and absorb water as well as nutrients in the process, and these are then used by plants to grow. As mentioned earlier, the indiscriminate use of pesticides can have unintended consequences, destroying microbes and affecting the growth of plants.
Also, pesticides often stay in the environment long after beening applied on agricultural lands and this means that they could be sent to water bodies by heavy wind or rainfall. Once in water bodies, they can kill aquatic animals such as fish and depopulate fishes.
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Sustainable Uses of Food Waste
SUSTAINABLE USES OF FOOD WASTE
Food waste is considered by many people as non-useful materials. It is harmful to the environment. Greenhouse gases are released as by-products of food waste and these warm the environment, causing imaginable negative environmental impacts such as sea level rise and floods. Wasted food items are also harmful to humans. It can cause illnesses such as meningitis and foot disease if human beings come in contact with it. In general, the issues of food waste constitute a burden to people and the society. It also creates financial losses to food waste producers.
It is noteworthy that waste hardly exists in theory. When waste is produced, in essence, it means that some of the resources (such as energy, chemicals, and labour) that were used to produce the wasted product had been given off or wasted.
A lot of people are making huge efforts to eliminate food waste. However, wasteful practices seem to be inevitable in today’s world. A promising and long-lasting solution to food waste is for it to be turned into useful items and reused, thereby averting it from getting to landfill.In today’s world, it is possible to make good use of food waste by turning it into resources. And below are a few things we can do sustainably with food waste.
Hunger: A significant proportion of food waste comes from food items in good conditions that were not used before their expiry dates. As health and safety require that expired food items be discarded, such unconsumed food items are sometimes sent to landfill sites. However, instead of sending the waste to landfill, an environmentally friendly way of dealing with food items that are in a good condition is to donate them to food banks or charities prior to their expiry dates. This measure is increasingly being used by supermarkets in developed countries to alleviate hunger in the society.
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Traceability in Farming Supply Chains
TRACEABILITY IN FARMING SUPPLY CHAINS
There are growing environmental challenges and people are increasingly aware of the environment. This awareness has extended to social issues faced around the world. Businesses within farming supply chains are concerned about these issues – they have to ensure that they are addressed within their operations to gain a competitive advantage.
Customers are asking critical questions about the social and environmental credentials of the food they eat. Customers want to know what farmers are doing within their own powers to improve the environment. They want to be rest assured that efforts are being made by supply chain players to combat climate change, reduce water scarcity and land pollution and so on.
In the context of social issues, customers want to understand the social conditions associated with the food they buy. They want to know if measures have been taken to ensure that no element of child labour was used to grow and produce their food crops, they want to be sure that farm workers were not exposed to health risks, and that workers are paid decently and so on.
In the same vein, environmentalists have come to terms with the fact that the environment has social dimensions attached to it. For example, people are part of the environment and it is expected that environmental protection measures being applied across all sectors of the economy should also put people into considerations – any measure that is deemed good for the environment should also be good for human lives and vice-versa before it can be implemented in any sector of the economy. As a result, efforts to improve environmental sustainability are also geared towards the creation of positive social impacts.
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