Dave Steward, ICL marketing manager for UK and Ireland, outlines the aims of the new scheme for the responsible sourcing of growing media and what this means for growers.
Many will remember the highly divisive peat debate of the 1980’s, culminating in the peat reduction targets in the Environment White Paper (2011) setting ambitious targets challenging the industry to phase out peat use in retail growing media by 2020 and in professional by 2030. As an industry, doing nothing was not an option and led to the formation of the Government backed Sustainable Growing Media Task Force − endeavouring to take a pragmatic and realistic approach to the issue.
Part of the Task Force proposals is that all growing media materials should be sourced soundly and environmentally responsibly.
Set up by the Horticulture Trades Association in conjunction with DEFRA, the Growing Media Association and other interested stakeholders, the Growing Media Initiative has responded by designing the P4 Responsible Sourcing and Manufacturing of Growing Media scheme. This sets out to differentiate more responsible products from less responsible and enables comparison of the same material from different sources. This voluntary scheme has been designed to be practical, simple, robust, meaningful and cost effective.
The P4 scheme has seven criteria that define ‘responsible’ –
- energy use
- water use
- social compliance
- habitat and biodiversity
- pollution,
- renewability and
- resource use efficiency
Each criteria then has a decision tree designed for use by growing media manufacturers to assess data and audit their individual inputs and final products. The calculator is currently publically available for testing and a link is available on the GMA website.
As an example, to calculate the energy consumed while making growing media, a manufacturer needs to use data from the entire supply chain. While all the energy use is measured, at each stage it is possible to offset energy use if renewable sources are used, such as solar panels. This level of attention to detail is likely to help stimulate supply chain improvements.
The scheme is currently a work in progress, in the future there will be auditor involvement and a continual improvement mechanism.
This initiative is good news for growers helping them use more responsibly sourced growing media manufactured from fully assessed materials. Finally, part of the assessment will be to ensure that the growing media is fit for purpose so that growers will also benefit from this quality assurance.
As a leading UK growing media manufacturer ICL is fully committed to this initiative. We aim to bring you further updates in the future.
Further information is available at www.growingmedia.co.uk