Going peat-free and plastic-free with CoirProducts.co.uk

With our environment constantly under threat, being more conscious of how our everyday gardening practices impact the environment around us, is important. Eating your own, home-grown produce can help ‘save significant amounts of greenhouse gas emissions’, while spending time in nature also has a multitude of benefits for our physical and mental health and wellbeing. 

Yet, using horticulture products that have minimal harm on the environment is also crucial. In this week’s blog post, we talk about how you can stay peat-free and plastic-free with CoirProducts.co.uk. 

Peatlands around the world store twice as much carbon as all of the world’s forests. In the UK, the government has banned the sale of peat in horticulture. The extraction of peatlands is harmful to the environment, threatening the biodiversity and the health of the planet. A report by The Wildlife Trusts has highlighted that the extraction of peat for horticulture in 2020 alone could release up to 880,000 tonnes of CO2. 

Coir has gained popularity as an environmentally-friendly alternative to peat-moss. Coir is a genuine waste material of the coconut industry. The natural and organic fibrous material that is used to make our various coir products such as our coir potting mix blocks, bricks, and discs, lies between the outer husk and the inner hard shell of the coconut. There is also minimal harm on the environment in producing our products. Our products are manufactured in Sri Lanka, and being carbon neutral, we also offset the carbon footprint associated with transporting products to the UK. In addition, each compressed block or brick of CoirProducts.co.uk coir potting mix gives a large volume of coir when expanded, which means, there is efficiency in transporting these products. 

Our CoirProducts.co.uk horticultural range also includes unique products for sowing, such as our CoirProducts.co.uk CoirCoins that come with a fully biodegradable cover, and is completely safe for the environment. Plants benefit from the natural properties of coir, where coir has high water retention ability, air porosity, and excellent drainage, helping plants develop stronger and healthier root systems. 

In addition to the harmful impacts of peat-based products, plastic pollution continues to be a key environmental concern, threatening the health of the planet. Data shows that, while in 1950, the world produced only 2 million tonnes of plastic per year, ‘the annual production has increased nearly 230-fold, reaching 460 million tonnes in 2019’. Every year, millions of tonnes of plastic waste finds its way into the ocean. 

Our coir products, such as CoirProducts.co.uk coir pots and coir seedling trays, are an ideal alternative to plastic pots and trays. A great thing about our coir pots and coir seedling trays is that they are biodegradable, which means they decompose into the soil, enriching the soil over time. CoirProducts.co.uk coir pots and coir seedling trays also allow roots to grow through the coir, so there is no transplanting shock when repotting later on. You can simply replant your plants on the ground, with the coir pots and trays themselves.