Donal Hickey: Why peat-free is so important
Council Is Way Says The One Conservation Crisis Climate Post And To Free Peatland Biodiversity Irish Our Tackle Peat
With BBC gardening guru Monty Don supporting, the campaign in England to ban the sale of peat for use in private gardens and allotments has an influential backer.
Don has lots of followers here in Ireland, where a similar campaign has been underway for some time, and he is a celebrity visitor to various gardening shows here. Our Government, however, has been long-fingering plans to introduce such a ban, which takes effect in England in 2024.
More supermarkets and garden centres are selling composts containing less peat. But, a bit like the slow uptake in electric vehicles, it could take some time to get people to buy into composts made from materials other than peat.
In a random survey of three supermarkets and a garden centre, I saw only one fully peat-free compost for sale. It was Irish-produced and was in a supermarket. All the other outlets had varieties described as containing 'peat-alternative', 'peat-reduced', or 'peat-blend'.
Also, of course, far more people are making their own compost, with numbers increasing from 10%, in 1980, to around 40% nowadays. All the experts tell us that fully-matured compost makes excellent fertiliser. Few would disagree with that.
As well as storing carbon, peatlands provide habitat to some of our most threatened wildlife, such as curlew and hen harrier, while also filtering water and preventing flooding downstream.
Bord na Mona, which has restored 7,200 hectares to peat-forming conditions, says it’s on track to restore a total of 8,125 hectares. Coillte is rehabilitating 2,100 hectares as part of its Wild Western Peatland Project, land which had been previously planted with pine and spruce.
The horticulture industry says it needs to continue mining 0.12% of peatland habitat for its operations, which seems a small figure. But the Irish Peatland Conservation Council (IPCC), notes that this has to be seen against a background of continuing decline of our bog environment.
The council said: “This isn’t just about the 0.12% of peatland the horticultural industry wants to mine, it is also about the environmental impacts downstream. Not only will peat extraction continue to ruin our efforts in managing the quality of our freshwater under the Water Framework Directive, but it will also allow our wild peatland habitat and native species to continue to decline."
In the IPCC’s view, we’re in a climate and biodiversity crisis and the way forward is to get communities together with a system for proper green, brown and food waste collection that can be diverted to peat replacement.
They said: “We already know what we have to do, Ireland must choose peat-free if as a nation we are serious about tackling our biodiversity and climate crisis."
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