Garden sustainably, reject artificial grass
AS more and more of our countryside is converted to pesticide-covered mono crops, our Welsh wildlife is becoming more reliant on our gardens for food and shelter.
But there has been a massive increase in people choosing to cover their gardens in artificial or plastic grass and thus turning our gardens into wildlife deserts offering no food.
Watching a blackbird or song thrush searching for worms and invertebrates on artificial grass must be one of the saddest sights in nature.
No insects can live there and no seeds or flowers are produced and so you remove the food source for birds, hedghogs, shrews, slowworms, frogs, bats, moles, butterflies, bees and many, many more species.
Add to this the fact that artificial grass does not soak up carbon dioxide and will eventually end up as yet more plastic rubbish taking thousands of years to biodegrade.
The State of Nature report clearly warned us that we need to change the way we run our lives if we are going to reverse the dramatic drop in our wildlife numbers.
Barry Action for Nature has launched a online petition on the 38 degrees website calling on the Welsh Government to warn consumers of the damage plastic grass is doing to our environment and we now need your readers to support us by signing the petition at https://you.38degrees.org.uk/ petitions/for-nature-s-sake-keepoff-the-plastic-grass
Be careful of the manufacturers’ arguments as currently they are making huge profits and its easy to pay PR experts to promote environmentally-damaging products. They will argue that with artificial grass you do not need to water or use chemical fertilisers but in Wales you should rarely need to water and there are organic fertilisers which can be used.
Finally, please support our petition and I have no doubt that once people are given the full facts about the damage artificial grass does to our Welsh wildlife people will choose to support nature and garden sustainably. Rob Curtis Barry Action for Nature Barry