In terms of allotments most people I know don't use pesticides, much plastic ( if used, it's used again and again each year ), and municipal water use is very l

In terms of allotments most people I know don't use pesticides, much plastic ( if used, it's used again and again each year ), and municipal water use is very limited due to the allotment system that disallows hosepipes or direct irrigation systems. Peat has been largely replaced with free compost from the local recycling centre. Clearly lots of small scale production, even if well planned, is less efficient than well planned industrial production, but a lot of the work in the allotments case is human labour rather than CO2 producing machinery. Note there is much less waste. I was struck recently by a story on the BBC where they interviewed somebody living 'off-grid' in Finland. He told the story of how he occasionally get's vegetables that are discarded from a supermarket. His friend brought him some tomato's produced in Africa, packaged in France, sold on in the supplier chain - all the way to Finland where they were to be thrown away!!! Obviously it's very hard to know how sustainable anything is given the complexity of supply - if only we had all the externalities ( environmental damage ) of production in the price ( energy properly priced ). The cost of disposal, or replacement of a resource factored in. That kind of stuff requires government action, as free markets reward the exploitation of externalities.