River Action urges Noble Foods to rethink its sustainability strategy as it fails to include river pollution as a key focus area…

Noble Foods has omitted river pollution from its recently identified 4 sustainability focus areas… prompting River Action to write again to the CEO. 

Having received no response from River Action’s last letter to Noble Foods’ CEO on 25th March, River Action’s Chairman has written again to Duncan Everett. This latest letter has been prompted by a talk given by Noble Foods’ agirculture director Graham Atkinson last month at the Alltech One Ideas conference. Atkinson outlined the company’s sustainability focus areas – none of which included any mention of river pollution and the mitigation of nutrient run-off.

The crisis in the Wye escalates each day. Phosphate levels have doubled in the past six years alone to the extent that the river has recently been described as a “wildlife death trap” which is reaching a point of no return. The primary cause of this destruction is now widely accepted to be nutrient-rich run-off of chicken excrement from intensive poultry units. As the the largest operator (by a wide margin) of egg-producing IPUs in the Wye catchment, the letter asks that Noble foods demonstrates leadership by publishing as a matter of urgency a nutrient management plan to mitigate phosphate run off from your IPUs. 

Read the full letter here. 

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