The UK’s largest garden retailer has switched its bedding plant production away from peat.
Why is that a good climate change story?
Peat has been a big part of gardening and horticulture since the 1960s, when mechanised extraction of peat began in earnest. Lowland raised peat bogs, many of them SSSIs, were drained and the peat-forming vegetation stripped off, for the peat soil scraped away and bagged for gardeners and commercial growers.
As well being a rare habitat across Europe with an appalling history of destruction and mis-use, lowland peat bogs are important carbon stores. Our lowland bogs mostly have very deep peat, up to 10 metres or so, having been storing carbon away from the atmosphere or many thousands of years, since the last ice age. Draining and digging up the peat releases carbon dioxide – Britain's gardeners are responsible for emissions of some 1.25 million tonnes of CO2 from peat use every year.
Peat has become a key part of commercial plant production, and of gardeners’ retail compost products. Concerned about both habitat loss and climate change, the RSPB has campaigned against its extraction and use for many years. We learned that whilst peat is convenient to use, it’s not essential to use, and so we’ve worked towards industry change to use more sustainable materials. We now have government targets to end peat use in UK gardening and Defra has a working group on sustainable growing media. Yet perhaps inevitably, there’s been resistance to this change and the peat industry is trying to push forward the oxymoron of responsible peat extraction.
B&Q’s new bedding plant production shows that peat can be replaced at the commercial scale. Across the UK, its garden centres will sell around 80 million plants in the next few months whose production is between 95% to 99% peat free. It’s a major step forward: peat is now shown to be unnecessary at significant volume in a key horticultural sector, with clear implications for wider change by industry and gardeners. This knocks on the head claims that wide scale peat use is essential to horticulture, and even that its extraction for gardening can be justified. Looking at the facts, B&Q found that peat use causes serious environmental problems, and has stepped up to end these by adopting alternative materials.
Alongside replacing peat, B&Q has also got rid of polystyrene packaging trays with what it calls easyGrow Teabag technology. This too has major environmental implications and will save 22,500 cubic metres of non-degradable waste going in to UK landfills – enough trays, placed end to end, to stretch from Land’s End to John O’Groats. And the plants are easy to handle and plant out in their new degradable containers.
So we’re pleased to help B&Q launch its new bedding plant range. Look out for them in store – and ask your garden centre about peat-free composts and plants. It’s an easy climate change act we can all take. And enjoying our gardens, and making a home for nature in them, should not come at the cost of taking away nature’s home in the countryside – let’s keep our bogs for the amazing wildlife that lives there.