Plants and greenery? Must be sustainable, right? Wrong.
One of the main hurdles that will prevent the human collective from forming a biobased collective are the environmentally hazardous practices that come as a result of us feeding the world.
But why is that an issue? Let’s break it down.
Fertilizers and Nitrous oxide emissions
Fertilizers provide plants with the essential nutrients they need such as nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium to grow. Normally, plants get this from the soil, but in order to meet industrial crop standards, these nutrients have to be systemically applied in order to improve production, or yield. That means more crops can grow per acre, reducing the need for more land.
Too much nitrogen, however, can have detrimental effects on the local ecosystem and the global greenhouse effect. When taken from the perspective of the whole life cycle, nitrogen has an impact starting from its production all the way to its disposal. Let’s look at it closely.
Synthetic nitrogen is created using the Haber Bosch process, a process combining atmospheric nitrogen gas with hydrogen under high pressure and heat. The result is ammonia, the base for most fertilizers. It’s efficiency is the reason the world can be fed today. But here’s the catch: this process uses up fossil fuels like natural gas for hydrogen and energy, pumping out massive CO2 emissions. About 1-2% of global energy use and around 1.8% of worldwide CO2 emissions result from just ammonia production alone.
Once fertilizers are applied to the soil, not all nitrogen gets absorbed by the plants. Up to 50% or more escapes into the environment. Enter nitrous oxide (N2O). Through microbial processes in the soil like nitrification and denitrification, excess nitrogen turns into N2O gas, which trickles up into the atmosphere. The unfortunate thing is, N2O is a greenhouse gas about 300 times more potent than CO2, and it remains in the atmosphere for over 100 years, negatively affecting the ozone layer. Agriculture accounts for nearly 80% of human-made N2O emissions in places like the US, mostly from fertilized croplands.
It doesn’t stop there. Runoff from the fields carries nitrogen and phosphorus into rivers and oceans, causing eutrophication- algal blooms that remove oxygen out of water -creating dead zones where fish and marine life can’t survive. Biodiversity takes a hit, soils degrade over time, and we’re left with a cycle that’s anything but circular. Phosphorus mining for fertilizers is another finite resource being depleted, often with toxic byproducts.
Our current agricultural practices are dependent on fossil fuels and chemical inputs that amplify emissions and pollution, making “bio” products far from green in their full lifecycle. Biofuels from crops compete with food production and often end up with a higher footprint when fertilizer emissions are factored in, essentially trading one environmental mess for another.
The fix? Precision farming to cut fertilizer waste, cover crops to lock in nutrients, or even “green” ammonia from renewables. But until we overhaul these habits, our dream of a sustainable biobased world stays just that: a dream. Feeding the world shouldn’t mean starving the planet.