#TierraSeca Ep.7: "Envueltos en plástico"

Almería is one of the most important agricultural hubs in Europe. Due to greenhouses, a technical revolution began in the late 70s and transformed the surrounding desert into a vegetable garden. Four decades later, the economic development of the area has been consolidated but, in turn, social and environmental problems have emerged. Once its useful cycle in greenhouses has been completed, the plastic has become a major problem. The lack of an effective inorganic waste management system has turned the countryside and the boulevards around the greenhouses into open-air garbage dumps, where tons of plastics pile up uncontrollably. The image of the plastic shreds at the mercy of the wind that end up enveloping and suffocating the plants of the Almeria desert is very graphic. But the worst does not happen before our eyes. The action of the sun breaks down, little by little, the plastic until it becomes smaller and smaller particles. Microplastics and nanoplastics end up mixed in the soil, becoming part of the local biome, thus entering the food chain. The discovery in 2020, by a group of Italian scientists, that cultivated plants absorb nanoplastics through their roots, and that they end up lodged in the produced vegetables, raises a horizon in which the presence of plastics in the cultivated soils will pose a public health problem.