A corn, wheat, or potato farmer browsing for fertilizers to improve crop yields might come across a product called Environmentally Smart Nitrogen (ESN). The promise of ESN, which, has been made by Canadian fertilizer manufacturer Nutrien (and before that, by the company's predecessor, Agrium) since 2000, is that its "polymer membrane," which encapsulates the nitrogen—a chemical element that is necessary for plants to grow—will release that input slowly and efficiently. The implication, in part, is that this will prevent an excess of nitrogen from poisoning water and soil, which is a common occurrence in communities where a lot of industrial farming takes place. A product safety page advises that the United States Department of Agriculture's EQIP program might even provide American farmers with some funds to purchase ESN as an environmental improvement practice. (In response to a request for comment, USDA issued a statement saying that "Any controlled release agrochemical could be included in a program payment for the associated conservation practice if it has been peer-reviewed through research, supported by the Land Grant University for use, and the conservation practice criteria includes controlled release.")
And yet, according to a new report released by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) titled Sowing a Plastic Planet, ESN and similar so-called "controlled-release" agrochemicals produced by petrochemical giants — not just Nutrien's ESN but also ICL Specialty Fertilizer's Osmocote and BASF's DuraGuard ME, for example — are anything but environmentally advantageous or sustainable. In fact, their "polymer" shells are plastics that, when paired with synthetic chemicals, could actually increase the toxic risks associated with the chemicals and overload soils with even more plastics than before. The effects are a detriment to human, animal and planetary health. (FoodPrint reached out to Nutrien, ICL and BASF for comment; none of them responded.)
