Bees 1 – 0 eBay

Fantastic news. The bee-killer pesticides are off eBay – AGAIN!

When a seller tries to put up a listing of a banned pesticide, they see this message asking them to review their listing, and informing them that certain pesticides are banned in the EU and cannot be sold on eBay:

62,827 emails (!) from 38 Degrees members pushed eBay into taking action. They even told the 38 Degrees office that they had people in “making manual checks over the weekend” – which for a huge corporation based on fancy technology is extraordinary.

Here’s a statement from eBay:

“An open letter to 38 Degrees supporters: 

eBay is a marketplace, not a retailer.  We rely on our sellers and our community to help us, as well as our own monitoring system.  We are still improving our system to catch listings for this issue, and it will get better, but no system is perfect.  We will immediately take action against items reported to us. 

It is our experience that sellers want to comply with the regulations, but often don’t know them so we will educate sellers about the rules too.

Last week it looked as though eBay had acted. 48 hours later the pesticides were back up on their site. But this time, it looks like eBay have actually done the work and fixed the problem. The staff team can’t find either of the banned bee-killers, imidacloprid or thiamothoxam, in pesticides for sale on eBay.co.uk right now – can you?

The charity Buglife, who first found the illegal pesticides on eBay, are now talking to eBay about their pesticide policies. Vanessa Amaral Rogers from Buglife started the original petition to eBay on Campaigns by You, a platform which lets anyone start their own campaign. [3] That’s how 38 Degrees members first got involved. Here’s what Vanessa has to say:

“After fantastic work from over 60,000 38 Degrees members, Buglife are extremely happy to report that neonicotinoid pesticides are no longer up for sale on eBay. We will be keeping a close eye on eBay to see whether they keep their promise and don’t allow the sale of these illegal bee-killing pesticides in the future – bees can breathe a sigh of relief for now.

Do you know of another corporate giant behaving badly? Is there something else you’d like to change? Click here to start your own campaign on Campaigns by You in minutes.

All this is not to say the banned pesticides will never go up for sale again. But eBay sound serious about fixing their systems – and now, eBay know that 38 Degrees members are watching.

So, some good news. But everyone keeping a watch out will help catch the illegal listings the next time they go up. Report anything you find – eBay want to hear it.

Until then, eBay!