INTERVIEW
“What I don’t want is the industry to move to something that is at least as bad if not worse than peat”
The future of compost As garden centres do all they can to be more sustainably responsible, the hottest potato of all is growing media and peat. Steve Harper reveals what the garden industry is doing to ensure the continued supply of quality compost in these ‘Blue Planet’ enlightened times. GTN’s Trevor Pfeiffer met with Steve Harper, Head of Commercial Sales and Marketing at the Greener Gardening Company (formally Bord na Mona UK), who is the lead for the industry’s Responsible Sourcing Scheme. Steve started by giving some background to the scheme. “In June 2011, the National Environment White Paper was published in which the government set a series of voluntary targets to ban the use of peat. They’d set a target for local authorities and governments to stop using it in 2015, which didn’t happen, consumers to stop by 2020 and growers to stop by 2030. A task force was set up and from that came a number of projects. Project Four, which has been developed into the Responsible Sourcing Scheme, was a way to get the industry to make sure the products we were using were responsibly sourced. “I always had a concern that we were going to replace peat with something else without knowing how good or bad that something else was. That was always the problem: It was ban peat, use peat-free products. But nobody had any real idea how good or bad those peat-free replacements were going to be. “The easy analogy is that 10 years ago we were told to switch from petrol cars to diesel cars because diesel cars did far more miles to the gallon and therefore the carbon footprint was much lower than using petrol cars. Now we’re being told to move back to petrol cars because the diesel particulates that come out of diesel cars are bad for human health, and that’s worse than the carbon difference. “What I don’t want is the industry to move to something that ultimately in 10 years’ time is at least as bad if not worse than peat. The project looks at how we measure all products equally. It doesn’t matter if it’s peat, coir, composted bark fibres, wood fibre, green compost, or whatever the raw material might be. Every time we use a different raw material, we can measure them using broadly the same criteria against each other to understand how responsible it is.”
2 March 2020
Steve says there are seven criteria that each product is measured against. Energy If you are harvesting peat, you’ve got tractors and machinery plus the energy that’s used in getting the product to the factory and the energy used in the factory. It’s taking all of the energy use up to the point you bag the product. Water As a planet, we’re becoming more and more water constrained. We are inside the UK but these products come from other parts of the world as well. So water becomes a big issue. Social compliance Are we producing the product in a socially compliant way? In terms of looking at how people are involved in the process. Is everybody paid a proper wage, we’re not using child labour?
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Habitat and biodiversity We haven’t opened new bogs for 10 or 20 years at least. So the damage we’re doing to the habitat and biodiversity is more limiting now, but the release of carbon coming off those bogs has become more of an issue. So, biodiversity is measured and it has become part of the process. Pollution Are any of the products we are using creating pollution downstream? Renewability How renewable are these products? You go from green compost which is renewable arguably on an hourly basis within a five-year window, to peat which is renewable over a 10,000 year period. Resource Use Efficiency That’s about using recycled or by-products as opposed to using virgin products in the first instance.
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