Thnks bud i never knew this and I will be sure not to use or recommend their products anymore. I am a former landscaper and am currenlty working on getting my landscape Architecture degree. Knowledge is power.I have used it MG and found it helpful in addition to a complete and balanced fertilizing program. Excesses and deficiences are not the fault of the product if you do not follow directions on the container. There are only a few forms of chemical NPK available on the market and all chemically based fertilizers use the same chemicals, just in differing combinations or analysis.
Congrats on your degree work.. landscape architecture is a very cool field.
Knowledge is power, but I'm not sure that's what is being conveyed here. Check out that greendaily link. Hardly the broad scathing indictment suggested (employee lawsuits? flipper babies? where and when? not in that link). It's not good, either - I'm not arguing that. But trust me, virtually every business organization is looking for shortcuts to profitability. It's the nature of the game.
My issue is this: people get on rants about this or that company, product, or activity without looking at the whole picture. It's easy to jump on Scotts / MG for distributing their "nasty chemicals", but these same chemicals are also coming thru to the consumer in many of the fancy-label nutes that try to imply eco-friendliness. Look at the labels -- ammonium sulfate? potassium nitrate? etc etc. These base constituents of plant nutrient products are ALL THE SAME (a point you made well). And, they all come from the SAME PILE of ammonium sulfate, etc. Many of these piles of raw material are actually produced by oil companies, so some people rage against MG, then go fill their gas tanks at Exxon.
And, as I laid out about 10 pages back and won't go into here, there's nothing ecofriendly about yarding out thousands of tons of natural kelp, bat guano, or producing worm castings. It's all nasty and destructive.
Do you know that bats need their guano in their caves? It's the nutrient base for the cave ecosystem, which is a lot more than bats.
This fellow on ICMAG makes a good non-technical argument:
http://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?threadid=106103&userid=33886
I'm an ecologist by trade; his info is sound.
Anyway, I'm not trying to carry any water for Scotts/MG. I just have a personal thing about one-sided arguments built more on emotion and knee-jerk interpretation of isolated facts (not accusing you of that directly... but it is kind of a national disease that I war against daily).