“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.” Steve says there are seven criteria that each product is measured against.

1Energy

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.

2Water

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.

3Social 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?

4Habitat 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.

5Pollution

Are any of the products we are using creating pollution downstream?

6Renewability

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.

7Resource Use Efficiency

That’s about using recycled or by-products as opposed to using virgin products in the first instance.

Happy Compost multi-purpose is badged as Vegan friendly as it only contains mineral plant feeds. Happy Compost Veg Growing bags are 100% organic but have animal by-products as plant feeds.

“Initially when this whole project was kicked off, carbon footprint was going to be a separate project but it was agreed by everybody at the time that it was almost impossible to be able to drill down to the carbon footprint of all the specific products. So, the energy use has become a kind of de facto alternative to the carbon footprint. It is not perfect by any stretch imagination.

“It’s an industry scheme and the entities involved are manufacturers, retailers, growers, non-government organisations such as Friends of the Earth, RSPB, Plantlife, and DEFRA.

“DEFRA are absolutely involved in this project. Judith Stewart, DEFRA’s Soil and Peatland Policy Specialist, has to go to the ministers and give them options in terms of which way they can go. So, she is keen that the industry has put forward an option. The government is currently going through consultation, which got paused because of Brexit and the election, but the government wants to look at everything from the extremes of: Let’s ban peat, let’s tax peat, let’s go and educate consumers about why there are issues with peat and why they should perhaps look at other things.

“The Responsible Sourcing Scheme is a different way of looking at things and I believe we should opt into that and set a responsible limit and then make that public knowledge so consumers can make an educated decision about what products they buy.

“From the consumers’ perspective there aren’t necessarily enough raw materials out there to replace peat if they did introduce a blanket ban tomorrow. Even if there were the price would be so much higher than the price that we’re paying now. If compost was £10 a bag are consumers radically going to use less compost?

“In some ways, it’s a crazy situation because somebody might walk into a garden centre and they’ll spend £20, £30, up to several hundred pounds buying a specimen plant. They might spend £30 or £40 buying the pot they’re going to put it in. And then they will want to spend less than a tenner to put the stuff in the pot that’s actually going to grow this plant for the next few years. The consumer’s mindset is out of kilter with how they should be thinking about this, because that growing media in the pot is arguably the most important part of this. If that doesn’t work, the pot may look great, but the plant will die.

“If you go back 20-30 years ago, when multi-purpose compost was invented, all of a sudden that became the cheaper alternative to us buying a seed compost, then a potting compost, then a tub and basket compost, or a Rose Tree and Shrub compost, which all cost more because they’re the right things for doing the job as opposed to multi-purpose, which with the best will in the world is a jack of all trades because it has to be everything from seed sowing to growing a mature plant. But we’ve moved the consumer into this world where because peat was so cheap to source it’s just become Continued on page 4 www.gardentradenews.co.uk

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Steve had two tips to pass on:

1Check what customers are planning to do with their growing media as they may well get better results and therefore more customer satisfaction by buying a product designed for a specific task at a premium price.

2After all the rain we’ve had this winter the best thing we should be offering multi-buys on is soil improvers. Our customers need to be digging that in to get structure and aeration back into the soil.

a commodity product. If we move into a world where we must go peat free we are going to have to pay more money.

“And the problem is, other industries have started to latch onto some of the raw materials we need to access. So if you take bark as just one example, when we first started using bark as a raw material, the wood mills saw it as a waste and the fact that the horticulture industry was taking it off their hands and it wasn’t very much money to buy the bark. Over time, they’ve begun to realise that, oh, actually, they want this product and so their prices have moved up. But then over the last five to 10 years, biomass has come along and biomass wants to burn anything it can lay its hands on and bark is as burnable as anything else. Because most biomass plants that have been built over the last 5-10 years have received government subsidies in terms of the energy that they produce they can afford to pay more for the material than horticulture is prepared to pay at this point in time for that same material.

“A lot of people say there’s plenty of green compost as a raw material in the UK and lots that we don’t use for growing media. When

Baytree Garden Centre’s ‘Steps to Success’ with growing media help customers choose the right compost for the right growing activity.

we use peat as a compost it is dead simple. Peat has nothing in it, so you alter the PH, you alter the amount of nutrients available to the plant, you start with a blank canvas. When you’re using any of these other raw materials. They all have individual levels of nitrogen, phosphate, potassium inside them, which they release at different rates. They also have different salt levels and different PHs.

“Green compost, fantastic as it is, has a higher level of nutrients in it. It’s got a higher electrical conductivity and because it’s got a higher PH, you can only ever use say 20% in a multi-purpose. If you were producing a soil improver, you could put 100% green compost in because it’s being dug into the soil and blended, 50/50 or more with soil. It’s good organic matter.

“When you focus on the big issues about peat it is renewability but then you look at other raw materials. If you look at creating wood-fibre, the process uses a huge amount of energy. Is that better than the carbon that’s been released by peat when it is dug up? When you’re using coir, it’s coming from a country where it has to be washed heavily using possible drinking water in a country that has scarce resources for its local population, for drinking water and then you have potential social compliance issues because of it’s about a third world country. Green compost possibly doesn’t have too many issues down the track. There is energy used in it, but it’s not huge. It’s completely renewable it’s a recycled product, so it should score relatively well.

“Each product has issues and the whole point of the Responsible Sourcing Scheme is to measure each one of these products alongside each other and then give them a score. Since November, a number of manufacturers have started scoring their raw materials. They have to go through a calculator which is available on the Growing Media Association website and they have to score each one of their raw materials versus this calculator, create all the evidence to prove that their scores are robust and then we will go to a third party auditor, one who also audits FSC, who will come in and audit all of those scores. Once a number of companies have had their product audited the benchmarking committee inside the Responsible Sourcing Scheme will decide what is going to be a responsible score. Products that score above that can be deemed to be responsible products, scores below that can’t be deemed to be responsible.

“By early summer 2020 we’ll have that responsible score. And that will allow manufacturers to then look at putting something on their bags for the season 2021. What we’re trying to do is mimic some labelling that’s regularly used in the market now and the favourite at the moment is something like the energy rating where you buy a fridge or even a house. The other thing the industry is working hard to try and do is the big question of what’s in the bag? We want to move forward by listing the core ingredients in the bag in order of percentages as with the food industry.”

4 If there are any other growing media

and peat issues coming up with your customers let us know by emailing trevor.pfeiffer@tgcmc.co.uk