Special report: the peat debate
As environmental charities call for a ban on peat in gardening by 2025, Sally Nex investigates how much we use and why going peat-free may be harder than it sounds
Do you know how much peat is in your potting compost? There’s a groundswell of concern among gardeners over the environmental cost of digging up peat to use in gardening. Yet we’re still planting our way through over two million cubic metres of peat every year.
Potting composts contain less peat than they used to – new industry figures show peat content is at its lowest in a decade. However, most are still far from peat-free. In fact only one in every 20 bags of compost on sale is peat free, and the average bag contains more than 40 per cent pure peat. Unless your bag of compost is clearly labelled peat-free, it will contain peat. ‘Organic’ doesn’t mean peatfree, nor does ‘eco-friendly’ or ‘sustainable’.
The plants you buy are usually growing in peat-based compost too – and at higher levels: professional composts are still on average two-thirds (62.9 per cent) peat. Pressure from eco-conscious gardeners looking for plants grown without the peat has bumped up peat-free compost use by growers though, to a highestever 23 per cent.
But campaigners say the gardening industry has been dragging its feet. “We’ve got a nature and climate emergency, and using peat in compost goes against both,” says Dr Olly Watts, Senior Climate Change Officer for the RSPB.
Environmental charities, including the RSPB, National Trust and Royal Horticultural Society, are now calling for an outright ban on the use of peat in compost by 2025.
Monty Don has added his name to the charities’ open letter to Environment Secretary George Eustice, saying the continued use of peat in compost is a form of “environmental vandalism”.
“There is no garden, however beautiful, that justifies the scale of environmental damage or contribution to climate change that peat-use causes,” he writes.
The letter says that eliminating peat from gardening will take decades at current progress, and points out that the industry has already missed the Government’s voluntary target to remove peat from compost for amateur gardeners by 2020.
The Government has made the ending of UK peat harvesting a priority in its bid to go carbonneutral by 2050. It has said it will introduce “further measures” to speed up progress in its peat strategy for England, due for publication at the end of 2020 – with a tax on peat being a possible outcome. “We urge all gardeners to play their part and only use peat-free products,” says a Defra spokesperson.
Peat bogs are the world’s best natural carbon sinks, locking away more carbon than the rest of the planet’s vegetation combined. Digging up their peat to use in gardens releases that carbon into the air again – as the peat dries out, the stored carbon combines with oxygen in the air and is released as carbon dioxide – with harmful effects on the climate. Peat degradation in lowland bogs in England alone releases 11 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year – about as much as three coalfired power stations.
The RSPB’s Dr Watts says that a direct consequence of harvesting peat for gardening is the destruction of one of our most precious habitats. “It’s ironic that gardeners want to trash wild plant habitats to grow plants in their own gardens,” he says. “It may seem like your few bags of compost don’t matter, but it’s death by a thousand cuts. If we all use a few bags, it adds up.”
A questionnaire by Gardeners’ World Magazine in 2018 showed that just over half of readers prefer peat-based compost. Some said peat performs better,
Peat degradation in lowland bogs in England alone releases 11 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year – as much as three coal-fired power stations
others said peat-free compost is too hard to find in garden centres, too expensive or too unpredictable. But many of you worried about the environmental damage caused by using peat, and said you would choose peatfree if quality was guaranteed.
Alan Roper, Managing Director of the Blue Diamond group, with 37 garden centres across the UK, says peat-free is still a minority choice. “People might agree with Monty, but they will still go out and buy peat,” he says.
All the major compost manufacturers now offer a peat-free option though, and Roper says the extra choice has helped make peat-free more visible and increase sales. This year he’s almost doubling the
number of peat-free brands on offer, from six to eleven. “If you just have a few options, you’ll sell to people who come in looking for peat-free, but not to browsers,” he says. “This year people are going to spot it.”
About half the compost sold at Dorset-based Gardens Group garden centres is peat-free. But owner Mike Burks, chairman of the Garden Centre Association, warns forcing gardeners to go “cold turkey” by only stocking peat-free composts might put people off gardening altogether. “Gardeners were very reluctant to move from soil-based to peat-based compost in the 1950s,” he says. “But, over time, they were converted.”
Still, the price of peat-free is a real issue for cash-strapped gardeners: the higher cost of peat substitutes often adds more than £2 per bag. “If it costs a little more, it’s just putting the environmental price into the price of the product,” says the RSPB’s Dr Olly Watts.
The industry is also struggling to find the quantities of peat alternatives it needs, at an economic cost, to meet rising demand. “There just aren’t two million cubic metres of alternatives out there at the moment to replace the peat,” warns Catherine Dawson, technical director at peat-free compost manufacturer Melcourt. Supplies of woodchip, the most widely used substitute for peat, are in high demand from government-subsidised, biomass-fuelled power stations, for example, leaving compost manufacturers having to pay high prices to compete with the energy industry to obtain it.
But B&Q now offers peat-free compost at the same price as peat-based, and multi-buy deals on peat-free are becoming more common. From a low base, peatfree increased its market share by about 50 per cent in 2020, boosted by compost shortages during the coronavirus gardening boom. “We’ve really crossed a line,” says Dawson. “People were forced to try peatfree and it’s opened their eyes.”
Peat-free is now keeping some of the country’s finest gardens blooming, including all five Royal Horticultural Society gardens, and National Trust gardens including Sissinghurst in Kent and Hidcote in Gloucestershire. “For years the National Trust has shown it’s possible to go peat-free in our garden centres, nurseries and gardens,” says National Trust Head of Nature Conservation,
Ben McCarthy.
But bags of compost are only half the story – getting peat out of the potted plants you buy is even more challenging.
Natalie Porter, of Merseyside wholesaler Happy Plants, produces millions of bedding plants each year in peat-based compost. She has tried peat-free and liked it, but it caused problems with her automated potting machines – the bark fragments bent the fine needles used to handle seedlings. She says peat-free would add about 20 per cent to the price tag of each plant, and since her margins are already small she would have to pass on the cost to consumers, hitting gardeners on tight budgets hardest. “Plants shouldn’t only be available to those who can pay higher prices for them,” she says.
And about a quarter of the plants we buy are imported from growers in Europe, where although there have been some efforts to reduce the amount of peat in compost, totally peatfree growing is rare. Sue Beesley has run her Cheshire-based nursery Bluebell Cottage Gardens without peat for 13 years, and raises what she can onsite from seeds and cuttings. But like most UK growers, to expand her range she has to buy new stock from Dutch wholesalers, which comes in peat. “I don’t think there’s going to be any way of eliminating peat in production completely,” she says.
Compost manufacturers are currently putting the finishing touches to a new compost-labelling scheme, aimed at telling customers clearly and for the first time exactly what’s in their bags of compost – and the environmental impact of those ingredients. The new Responsible Sourcing Scheme labels will appear at point of sale this year and on bags from 2022. They’ll list ingredients in order, largest amounts first, like food labels. Then each is given an eco-rating.
To get the rating, each ingredient is measured against seven criteria, from energy and water use to biodiversity, social impacts such as employment rights, and renewability – though not yet carbon emissions, which will be added as the scheme develops.
Steve Harper, who chairs the scheme, says this creates a “level playing field”, under which peat substitutes like coir, imported from South Asia and requiring lots of water to produce, in an area where water is scarce, have to stand up to the same environmental scrutiny as peat. “The scheme is about making an informed decision,” he explains.
It remains to be seen how far the Government is prepared to go in forcing the gardening world to stick to its deadline to be completely peat-free – compost, plants and all – by 2030. Neil Bragg, of industry umbrella group the Growing Media Association, thinks that 2030 is achievable. He believes the industry will be “driven to peat-free if that’s what the consumer, retailer and Government decides – what else are they going to do?”
But the RSPB’s Dr Olly Watts says we should already be there. “I don’t think this is something gardeners should be having to worry about,” he says. “If we buy things, we should be able to expect retailers to put something environmentally responsible in front of us.”
■ Would you pay more for your compost and plants, to put an end to peat extraction? Let us know – see p18 for contact details