MINAGRIS project now one year old
MINAGRIS is one year old, and what a year it has been! The team have been busy working on a number of activities, from developing and launching our multiscale experiment protocol, to completing a Europe-wide sampling campaign across 11 case study sites.
Partners in the project have presented at seminars, conferences, and public events, and we have co-hosted two joint stakeholder forums with our sister project PAPILLONS. Team members have published the first papers affiliated with MINAGRIS. Meanwhile, we have produced several key deliverables, including developing the SoilPlastic citizen science app (available on Apple and Android).
We rounded up year one with our annual plenary, this year hosted by the Slovenian partners in Ljubljana. This was a fantastic opportunity to check in with each other, establish where we stand and plan next steps for a productive year ahead!
Farmers give up using municipal compost due to high plastic content.
Photo credit: Canva
Our UK team has recently finished sampling agricultural fields for plastics large and small as part of the MINAGRIS project. During this time, it has become increasingly clear that we have a compost problem.
Municipal compost is made with our kitchen countertop and garden green waste collections. When it first arrived at scale as an option for farmers to apply this valuable source of organic matter to their fields and boost their soil carbon, it seemed like a win-win. It had the potential to bring otherwise wasted nutrients back into the food system, saving them from stinking out our bins before ending up in landfill or an incinerator. This was a bold shift towards a more circular economy, which had the potential to be great for soils and farm profitability.
The problem is the high plastic content. Farmers and growers initially eager to make use of this black gold to improve their soil health quickly realised that the plastic content of municipal compost was so high that they were no longer happy putting it on their land. This came up repeatedly in our farmer interviews and whilst we were sampling. Our initial enquiries indicate that this seems to be a widespread understanding within the farming and market gardening communities, not just in the UK but Europe-wide.
Read more: Farmers give up using municipal compost due to high plastic content.
