Completed petition Protect our wildlife...ban plastic grass in Wales!
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, hedgehogs, shrews, frogs, bats, moles, butterflies, bees and 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.
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As our country side is increasingly converted to intensive farming, our Welsh wildlife is becoming more and more reliant on our gardens for food.
The groundbreaking "State of Nature" report (stateofnature.org.uk) 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.
There are very real concerns about the negative effect plastic grass use will have on both micro plastic pollution and the risk of future flash flooding events.
Manufacturers will argue that artificial grass does not need to watering or use the use of chemical fertilisers but in Wales you should rarely need to water a lawn and there are organic fertilisers which can be used and maintained with electric mowers using renewable energy.
I have no doubt that once people are given the full facts about the damage artificial grass does to our Welsh wildlife they would choose to garden sustainably. Wales could once again lead the way for future bans in the rest of the UK.
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In addition to the online petition, this petition has collected 130 signatures on paper.