A few weeks ago the social media was full of pleas, ‘Where
can I get some compost?’ ‘Where can I get grow bags?’ ‘How can I sow seeds and
pot on without compost?’
Some may deny there was a panic, but compost season
was upon us, social media was alive with requests and we could not get hold of it
easily. Soon the peat was piled high outside every B&Q, DIY store and lots
of supermarkets where bags of multi purpose compost and grow bags did not wait long to be bought and, unlike
toilet rolls, was taken to gardens, potting sheds, greenhouses and allotments.
How many of these large and voluminous sacks were
peat free? Did we look and check the percentage of content that was peat? How
many paid those extra pounds to get peat free? How many bought a variety of
alternatives instead of one single peat laden sack? The majority of what was
sold in every bag was peat. There may have been a few words about ‘moving
towards peat free’ and ‘reduction of peat content’ but ‘peat bags with some
other stuff’ was what was bought. Some 65 per cent of those purple coloured
B&Q multi-purpose compost bags was pure peat.
So just how much peat are we using in on our
gardens, horticultural industry and farming? Each year we buy some 2 million
cubic metres of peat to grow flowers and vegetables. It makes up around 50 per
cent of the growing material used by the commercial horticulture trade. 66 per
cent of the total peat consumed in the UK is in growing media such as
multi-purpose compost and grow bags. Despite all the noise about ‘peat free’ we
are still using approximately the same amount of peat in our growing media as
we did in the late 1990s.
Some would say that peat is a renewable source as it
is based on decaying bog plant materials. Well that is true, but you will have
to wait a long time to replace the peat we use today. It takes thousands of
years to develop peatlands which can be up to 10 metres deep, but they only grow
at a rate of 1mm a year. So unsurprisingly we continue to steal peat faster than
it can be replaced, and commercial extractors can remove up to 22cm of peat per
year.
Some 700,000 tonnes of peat a year is still produced
in the UK and although this figure is declining, the demand is now being met
with 56 per cent coming from Ireland and 6 per cent from the Baltic states. In 2018,
Irish companies exported nearly half a billion euros worth of horticultural
peat. much of it to the UK. Last January, the UK’s Committee on Climate Change
recommended banning peat extraction for all uses in the UK. ‘There would need
to be an accompanying ban on the sales of peat, given that two-thirds are
imported, mainly from Ireland’, the Committee added.
The
UK has lost some 94% of its lowland peatlands and what is left, in a handful of
location covers a mere 6,000 hectares (the equivalent to 6,000 sports pitches).
Private use of peat in gardens and allotments releases a million tonnes of Co2
every year. Removing it from composts and grow bags has been estimated as being
the same as taking about 350,000 cars off the road. In 2008, 6.1 million tonnes
of peat was consumed globally for horticulture and 16.1 million tonnes for fuel
use. Although fuel usage is not what we are covering today, peat when it is
burned, like burning coal, again releases a significant amount of carbon
content as carbon dioxide.
Successive UK governments have not taken any
regulatory action to force the phasing out or banning of use of peat compost in
our gardens and allotments or within the horticultural and farming industry. Targets
have been set and voluntary regulation been sought and as yet we have failed to
deliver.
So we can safely say that peat, like many other natural resources,
is being abused because it’s cheap and functional? Have commercial reasons
caused us to fail to regulate its use, or is it because we are not being
educated to know better and say, 'No'?
Tomorrow I will look at why peat has become so popular since it became commercially available just a few decades ago, the
alternatives. I will then look importantly at the options we can take to bring about ecological change.
