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From global warming to the flood of plastic in the oceans, humans are responsible for numerous harmful interventions in the earth’s system. One of them has so far been less firmly anchored in public consciousness: the environmental impact of artificial fertilizers. The Haber-Bosch process, developed at the beginning of the 20th century, creates the basic fertilizer building block ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen – which to this day comes from fossil raw materials. The resulting mass use of artificial fertilizers enabled enormous global population growth, but also contributes significantly to groundwater pollution, over-fertilization of the oceans, loss of biodiversity and an acceleration of climate change.
