Sustainability Award – Southern Trident

Harmony Gardens

- a world first in growing media

If there was one buzzword that was echoing around the halls of the NEC during Glee, and a word firmly on many visitors’ minds, it was sustainability. Everyone in the gardening industry and most gardeners want to demonstrate their green credentials, and create products and garden in a way that is eco-friendly.

AAs our planet lurches from one disaster to another, the subject of climate change and greenhouse gases has led our industry to move away from using peat in growing media and look for the best peat replacements.

The team at Southern Trident was delighted when it was awarded two New Product Awards at Glee, which shows that it is bang on trend with the current green gardening movement. This rapidly growing player in the growing media sector won the Best New Growing Media Product 2021 and the Sustainability Award, both for its new range of peatfree growing media under the new Harmony Gardens brand. This latter award highlights the company’s underlying mantra that drives its core values - Green Today, Greener Tomorrow.

Southern Trident is extremely proud of its high-quality range of peat-free, growing media. Previously, the company only sold compost as dried, compressed coir bricks, but the Harmony Gardens range is a new venture expanding the company into the world of bagged products. The Harmony Gardens range includes: a peat-free multi-purpose compost with a balanced, mineral fertiliser; a full size grow bag that is

To find out more about Harmony Gardens, visit the Southern Trident website, southerntrident.com, or contact the company at

sales@southern

trident.com or call on

020 3633 7786.

perfect for growing fantastic crops of fruit and vegetables and delivering amazing flavour; top soil for creating new garden borders, replacing old soil and levelling lawns; soil improver, which contains a unique form of nitrogen that helps improve all poor soils, adding organic structure and enhancing the performance of all plants. All products in the Southern Trident portfolio, including Harmony Gardens, are made exclusively from environmentally-responsible by-products and recycled raw materials, and the company is now uniquely carbon neutral verified to PAS 2060. As one of the

New Product Awards judging panel commented: “This is taking peat-free to a new level.”

When coir first appeared in the UK and was incorporated into composts it had a very mixed reputation as a growing medium. And not surprisingly so, it was variable! Southern Trident has overcome these shortcomings by producing a quality product. While quality can be seen as a relative term, it is absolute when it comes to the company’s coir supply. Achieving consistent quality is built into the production process. Right from the start, from choosing quality dried husks, to fresh water washing to lower its salt content, through to the final QC process, every step in the production process is carried out to set

We strive to produce innovative products that truly meet our pledge to be green today and greener tomorrow.

standards. Southern Trident’s Indian manufacturing site holds a ISO9001 Quality Management accreditation. The company is backed by several years of experience and an R&D facility to create new formulations to suit specific applications. The production facility in India, supported by an affiliate partner network, ensures a quality product every time.

Offering quality coir and other recycled materials to the market, is just one small part of the company’s commitment to sustainability. Consciously choosing certain shipping lines for their carbon emission offset programs to reducing where possible its packaging for the retail range shows a total commitment towards sustainability.

Southern Trident’s green credentials have been rewarded during 2021. The company recently celebrated Soil Association accreditation for its responsibly sourced coir, meaning they can be used with confidence by organic gardeners. It became an inaugural accredited member of the new Responsible Sourcing Scheme for Growing Media (RSSGM), which was launched at Glee, working with Defra, the HTA, growers, retailers and other manufacturers. And just before Glee opened, it won an International Green Apple Environment Award from The Green Organisation, and has become a Green World Ambassador – special people who demonstrate their environmental commitment by helping the organisation to achieve its prime target – to recognise, reward and promote environmental best practice around the world.

Steve Harper, Southern Trident’s CEO, says “We strive to produce innovative products that truly meet our pledge to be green today and greener tomorrow. The business believes success will be borne from giving consumers products that deliver great results whilst minimising the environmental impact created.”

Balaji Manoharan, Southern Trident’s co-founder and Managing Director adds “We have always believed in offering products that add real value to everyone in the chain. And we have included our environment as a key stakeholder in this chain. So, a lot of care and thinking goes into everything we do as a company. Both our consumer brands are a testimony to this fact.”

Despite the expansion in Southern Trident’s range this year, 66 new products were launched at Glee, the company isn’t resting on its laurels. It is already looking at lots of new and exciting product developments in growing media, including incorporating additional plant growth enhancers in its range. But that’s for 2022. You’ll just have to wait until then to find out what these are!

You can also follow Southern Trident on social media: facebook.com/cocoandcoir

instagram.com/cocoandcoir twitter.com/cocoandcoir linkedin.com/company/southerntrident

To Mike

Subject Southern Trident – How they got to Carbon Neutral…

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the email, it’s amazing the interest carbon neutrality has created, it’s not necessarily new, companies like Sky, M&S, Google and Avis are all carbon neutral but not something this industry has overly engaged in to date but am sure it will as time goes by.

Firstly, I would just say that we have done this to stand by our mission statement of being “green today and greener tomorrow”. It is hugely important to the business to be as sustainable as possible and be ethically and morally sound in what we do. I may have mentioned before we already give a proportion of our profits to CRY an NGO that supports deprived children in India and more recently the Soil Association has accredited our coir as being an organically approved input material. All small steps to try and do the right thing as a business.

So, back to carbon neutrality, simply put we had to measure all of the carbon we create, so that includes things like • Manufacturing of coir and it’s shipment to the UK. This is where the biggest misnomer lives, people think “oh coir, it’s shipped halfway around the world, that must be bad”. Actually, on a large ship carrying up to 14,000 containers, it dilutes the carbon massively; shipping it to the UK only accounts for 5.5% of my carbon footprint. • This was “relatively” simple because we had done a lot of the work preparing to join the Responsible Sourcing Scheme for Growing Media. o Interesting fact for you, the carbon footprint per cubic metre of coir shipping it to

Liverpool is less per cubic metre sending bark from Scotland to Liverpool by truck. • Staff travel to and from work and on business • Waste • Energy used on site • Packaging • Shipment to retailers and/or consumers. o This is the worst area and accounts for around 45% of our total carbon footprint.

It didn’t surprise me really; I recall measuring the carbon footprint of a bag of

Multipurpose Compost whilst at Sinclair’s and 50% of the footprint was shipping the product to the garden centre.

This is all measured to the 2014 WRI Green House Gas Protocol – Corporate Accounting Standard. This gave us a tonnage of carbon that we create.

Once we had measured the footprint, we have to support a carbon offsetting scheme to achieve carbon neutrality. To ensure its credentials we chose a project that is overseen by the United Nations and complies with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The specific project invested in is Avoidance of methane emissions from Municipal Solid Waste and Food Waste through Composting. Based in India, this project activity entails production of organic manure- ‘Enrich’ from municipal solid waste (MSW) and food waste (comprising of fish waste and coconut husk) through composting. This was chosen because a) it operates in India, the home of our raw material and b) involves the coconut, the starting point for coir.

We then had to write an Action Plan as to how we will reduce our footprint moving forward, it’s not enough to just measure and offset, you have to reduce moving forward as well. So to this point we are looking at things like reducing the use of packaging, eliminating waste and increasing recycling as examples by which to reduce our total footprint.

Hopefully that helps. Kind regards, Steve