Planetary Boundaries and Agriculture: Novel Entities

Welcome to part 2 of 7 in our series exploring planetary boundaries, a scientific framework that sets recommend thresholds for human impact on Earth’s systems. With a new EAT-Lancet report published this October and focused on feeding 10 billion people within the planetary boundaries, we’re diving into these limits and the key drivers pushing us past them.

In this Synthesis series, we explore our food system's role in each of the breached planetary boundaries and how food tech can offer solutions. See other posts in the series:

1. Land System Change

Breached Boundary 2: Novel Entities

Novel entities are ”new substances, new forms of existing substances, and modified life forms” that humans have introduced into the environment, many of which can disrupt Earth’s systems.[1] They include plastics, manufactured chemicals, engineered materials or organisms, as well as naturally occurring elements (like heavy metals) mobilised by human activity.

Not only can novel entities directly impact wildlife and human health (for example, plastic additives and PFAS are linked to cancers, hormonal disruption, and immune effects [2, 3]), their long-lasting presence means the damage is not easily reversible. “Forever chemicals” like PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) persist indefinitely in the environment and have spread globally. These can now be found in rainwater, soils, and even in our blood.[3]

Public attention has mostly focused on the visible offenders (e.g. plastics piling up in oceans and landfills) while overlooking “invisible” pollutants like pharmaceutical residues.[4] Yet visibility has little to do with impact. Whether seen or unseen, all novel entities can be deeply disruptive to ecosystems and human health.

Novel entities are, like the planetary boundaries themselves, interconnected and interdependent. A push in one can pull the other. For example, microplastic particles can contribute to the spread and evolution of bacterial antibiotic resistance.[5 to 7] Ocean plastic pollution often harms wildlife, reducing biodiversity and pushing the biosphere integrity boundary closer to its limit. Heavy metal contamination from mining can disrupt soil microbial communities and inhibit carbon fixation, reducing soil carbon sequestration and weakening the resilience of the climate change boundary.[8]

In this post, we will explore the ways our food system creates novel entities and how food-tech solutions could help bring us back within the safe limits of this planetary boundary.

To learn more about the nine planetary boundaries (novel entities being one of them), refer to our earlier post.

Key Drivers of Novel Entities

The rapid increase in chemical production since the mid-20th century is the leading cause for the breaching of this planetary boundary. Today, there are an estimated 350,000 different types of novel entities circulating on the global market.[9] Examples include plastics, pesticides, and antibiotics. Ubiquitous because of their usefulness, these accumulate because the flow of many pollutants into air, land and water exceeds the Earth’s ability to absorb and neutralise them.

“The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals and other novel entities into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity”, says Patricia Villarubia-Gómez from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.[9]

Since 2016, a new substance has been registered in the CAS database every 1.4 minutes.[10] CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service) is the world’s most comprehensive chemical database, containing more than 204 million chemicals disclosed in literature since the early 1800s.[11] This rapid increase, combined with inadequate control of releases and incomplete knowledge of their effects, underpins why we have already exceeded the safe operating zone for novel entities as a planetary boundary.

Figure 1: Global production capacity for a number of groups of novel entities

Our Food System’s Impact

The “massive use of novel entities in food production, processing and packaging (ranging from pesticides to plastics) remains a major concern,” explains the new EAT-Lancet report.[38] The three largest drivers of novel entities in our food system are plastics; synthetic pesticides and herbicides; and pharmaceuticals for livestock.

Plastics

Plastics are a novel entity that we have produced globally and in vast quantities. From 1950 to 2022, we produced more than 11,000 million tons (Mt) of virgin plastics consisting of fossil-fuel-based resins, fibres, and additives.[13] Their production rate increased from 2 Mt per year in 1950 to 504 Mt per year in 2022.

Of all the plastic waste generated globally from 1950 to 2017, only 10% was recycled, 14% was incinerated, and the remaining 76% was discarded into landfills, open dumps, or directly into the natural environment.[14]

“For recycling to significantly reduce the current pressures on planetary boundaries, the production of virgin plastics material has to be considerably reduced, coupled with improved regulations and design standards to enable materials reuse and recovery.”[13]

Our food system is responsible for 3.5% of global plastic, most of which is used just once before being discarded.[15] According to the FAO, agricultural plastics are a major source of contamination in soil and oceans, with soils now known to contain even larger quantities of microplastics than oceans.

Up to 1 million tons of fishing equipment is abandoned in the ocean every year.[16] Ghost nets, which can legally be up to 2.5km in length in international waters, make up 46% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (now 1.6 million square km in size, three times that of France).[17] These abandoned nets are often made of durable synthetic plastics, such as nylon, high density polypropylene, and high density polyethylene.

These plastics decompose slowly over hundreds of years, releasing millions of tons of microplastics into the ocean, which can travel through food webs, from zooplankton to fish and then into humans. In fact, it is estimated that 60% of all fish today have microplastics in their organs.[18]

Figure 2: Ocean plastic pollution

Antibiotics

Antibiotics are another type of novel entity that we have produced exponentially. In recent decades, their misuse has resulted in the rapid rise of antimicrobial resistance (”AMR”), with some infections now untreatable.[19] AMR, when bacteria evolve to withstand the drugs we rely on to fight them, directly resulted in the death of 1.27 million people in 2019.[20]

Economist Jim O’Neill chaired a report commissioned by the UK Government and the Wellcome Trust in 2016, where he estimated that by 2050, 10 million lives a year and a cumulative $100 trillion USD of economic output will be at risk due to AMR.[21] In Bruce Friedrich’s TED Talk, Executive Director of the Good Food Institute, he quoted a finding from this report stating that threat to the human race from antibiotic-resistant superbugs is greater than the threat from climate change.[22]

What’s often left unsaid about antimicrobial resistance is who the real takers of these drugs are. We tend to think only of humans, but a far larger share goes elsewhere - to farm animals.

Researchers estimate that roughly 70% of the world’s antibiotics goes to livestock.[23] In 2010, livestock consumed at least 63,200 tons of antibiotics, far exceeding total human consumption.[24] This is not surprising giving the poor hygienic conditions and animal welfare practices on most farms, which increases the risk of disease for both animals and humans.

Figure 3: Antibiotic use in livestock compared to proposed thresholds*

Synthetic Agrochemicals

Synthetic crop treatments, including pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, are a class of novel entities that have rapidly proliferated in the global food system. In 2023, we used 3.73 million tonnes of active pesticide ingredients in agriculture globally, doubling since 1990.[25] These treatments have crucial benefits in protecting crops and increasing yields, which have allowed us to feed a growing global population. Their importance was shown in the disastrous short-lived ban of synthetic agrochemicals in Sri Lanka in 2021, which resulted in drastic losses crops, decreased yield, and food insecurity.[26]

However, these crop treatments also can pose problems, negatively impacting wildlife and throwing ecosystems off balance. Pesticides and fertilizers are thought to be the largest cause for the decline in Europe’s bird population, a number that has shrunk by over 500 million in the last 40 years.[27] Synthetic crop treatments also negatively impact pollinators, frogs, and other important species.[28]

Through runoff and leaching, these chemicals can travel far from their application sites, contaminating ecosystems. Persistent compounds like DDT have been found in groundwater, soil, and in the bodies of wildlife long after use. [28] We do not eschew synthetic crop treatments all together but rather argue for using them thoughtfully and reducing use when possible.

Figure 4: Tractor spraying a field of crops

Food Tech as a Solution

Food tech solutions can help minimise the release of novel entities into our environment. Before seeing just a few examples of how food tech can reduce our use of novel entities such as plastics, antibiotics and synthesis crop treatments, it’s worth noting that many of the enabling technologies Synthesis invests in, such as Pow.Bio and Triplebar, have broad applicability in other areas of synthetic biology and biomanufacturing. For example, novel ag-biologics can be produced via precision fermentation, and the same synthetic biology principles and strain engineering technologies used to transform cells for food production are now being used to break down “forever chemicals” like PFAS and upcycle them into useful products.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at a few examples of how food tech can help us reduce our use of these novel entities:

• Plastics: Plant-based and cultivated seafood alternatives can produce seafood products without the need for fishing, and without contributing to the ocean’s discarded fishing plastic crisis. Companies tackling this include New School Foods, a maker of plant-based salmon using directional freezing technology, and Wildtype Foods, a producer of salmon via cell. By shifting demand away from conventional seafood, these alternatives help protect marine ecosystems from one of the most harmful and persistent forms of ocean plastic pollution.
• Antibiotics: Rather than using antibiotics to raise animals in concentrated animal feeding operations, we can transition consumption to cultivated or plant-based meats. In cultivated meat, the equivalent of an animal is a bioreactor, where meat is grown from animal cells without the need to raise or slaughter livestock. As you’d expect, conditions in these “farms” are far more sterile and controlled, meaning there’s no need for antibiotics to prevent disease in the herd.[29] For example, if a “farm” like Upside Foods (a Synthesis cultivated meat portfolio company) can supply a city’s chicken demand, it avoids the need to raise millions of broilers dosed with the antibiotic tetracycline, thereby avoiding the tons of tetracycline-laden waste those chickens would have produced, which may have finally entered the city’s sewage systems, water sources and soil.[30, 31]
• Synthetic Crop Treatments: Using crops directly to feed humans rather than livestock is one of the most powerful levers we have to reduce agricultural land use, and thus synthetic agrochemical needs. 38% of global cropland, 77% of the world’s soy, and 35% of US corn is used for animal feed.[32, 33] In the US, an estimated 235 million pounds of herbicides and insecticides were applied to US corn and soy used for animal feed in 2018 alone.[34] By feeding people crops, rather than feeding animals who eventually become human food, we could reduce synthetic crop treatment usage. Redefine Meat’s steak can reduce land use when compared to beef from cows by 71%, with other analyses suggest even greater land savings.[35, 36] Alternative proteins can produce the same food with far less land, minimising the quantity of synthetic pesticides and herbicides that are applied. Additionally, agricultural biologic technologies can reduce the need for synthetic crop treatments by improving plant immunity, nutrient uptake, or soil health. For instance, biostimulants can improve plant nutrient use efficiency (NUE), maintaining yields while enabling a decreased use of synthetic agrochemicals.[37]

Innovative food technologies offer powerful tools to reduce the use of novel entities in agriculture. Although the food system isn’t always top of mind when discussing novel entities, its impact is substantial. The EAT-Lancet report shows that the food system’s contributions to pesticides and antimicrobial use (shown as pie charts below) make up the majority of global use of these novel entities.[38]

Figure 5: Status of food system pressure across all nine planetary boundaries

We have the potential to reduce plastic pollution, minimise antibiotic use, and to decrease agrochemical use by transforming our food system.

By investing in sustainable food innovations, we can begin to heal some of the breaches in this important planetary boundary.

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