Waitrose signs ‘charter for nature’ – but still sells chemicals lethal to wildlife
In March, John Lewis chairwoman Sharon White announced that the partnership had become the first retailer to sign up to a charter that asks industry to put nature and the environment at the heart of its activities.
She was referring to Prince Charles’s excellent Terra Carta initiative, which provides a roadmap to 2030 for businesses to move towards sustainability, including restoration of biodiversity, and insists that “the fundamental rights and value of nature” must be centre stage of everything companies do.
So why are John Lewis’s Waitrose stores – main outlet for the Duchy organic brand founded by Charles – selling insecticides and fungicides whose labels variously make clear they are “dangerous to bees” and other pollinating insects and “very toxic to aquatic life”?
Such are the warnings, respectively, on the combined insecticide and systemic fungicide Rose Clear Ultra Gun! 2, and the “surface biocide” Patio Magic! Concentrate. I’ve several times reminded my local Waitrose in Cambridge that we’re in the middle of a biodiversity crisis, while drawing attention to their pro-environment pledge, but the problem continues. This is just rank hypocrisy.
Waitrose isn’t the only offender. Unsurprisingly, these lethal substances are also widely available at other shops and garden-centres and from Amazon.
And there’s another, extremely important, point: do Waitrose and the other suppliers truly not know that Rose Clear, as well as being a lethal threat to bees and all the other pollinators, also undermines biodiversity by wiping out important foods for birds? Many, especially blue tits, are enthusiastic about eating greenfly. Sparrows feed the aphid to their chicks, and ladybirds, lacewings, hoverfly larvae and earwigs lap them up too.
I’ve now complained formally to Waitrose and fully expect a defensive, pure-as-the-driven-snow reply. Charles, though, is, I’m sure, a keen follower of Bronterre News, so no doubt he’ll shortly be wagging a condemnatory finger in Sharon White’s direction.
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