Lisa Sadleir

There's a region in southeastern Spain called Almería. If you look at it on Google Earth, you'll see something that looks like a glitch in the satellite imagery. It's not a glitch. It's 64,000 acres of plastic greenhouses. So much plastic sheeting that it's visible from space. The entire landscape is white reflective plastic stretched over industrial farming operations growing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and lettuce for European supermarkets year-round. This plastic sea has created its own microclimate. The reflective surface is so vast it's actually lowered local temperatures by reflecting sunlight back into the atmosphere. Scientists call it the "Albedo effect of Almería." The only place on Earth where human activity has cooled the local climate, and it's an environmental catastrophe they accidentally made while building plastic farms. The plastic itself is single-use agricultural film. It degrades in UV light within 3 to 5 years, breaks into microplastics, blows into the Mediterranean, and ends up in the ocean and soil. Every year, 45,000 tonnes of plastic waste is generated just from replacing degraded greenhouse covering. Inside these greenhouses, workers from Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa labor in 45°C heat for €30 per day, no contracts, no rights, spraying crops with pesticides that would be illegal if used on outdoor crops due to concentration levels. The ventilation is minimal. The chemical exposure is constant. The groundwater underneath Almería is so contaminated with agricultural runoff that it's unusable. The region imports water from other parts of Spain while sitting on top of a poisoned aquifer they created. And this is what supplies your "fresh" vegetables in January. Grown in plastic factories, by exploited workers, using groundwater they've contaminated, wrapped in more plastic, and shipped across Europe so you can have tomatoes in winter. But sure, cattle grazing on Scottish hills are the environmental problem.