For Peat's Sake, a Renewable Replacement

Photo credit: jshiell

Organix, an organic-residuals-management company, is now shipping its first commercial peat-moss replacement to customers in the region—one that could also herald a new environmentally friendly way dairies can manage their waste.

Gardeners are familiar with peat, compressed into cake-like pellets for starting seeds indoors or used in bulk as a soil enricher, compost component, or an ingredient in planting mix. But peat harvesting is an industrial-scale mining operation that is rapidly turning ancient peat bogs into one of the planet's most endangered wildlife habitats.

The product, called RePeat, contains no peat moss and is created using a patent-pending system called FibeRite, which takes dairy solids from an anaerobic digester and converts them into a peat-moss substitute designed for the horticulture industry.

"We have been working on this process for quite a while; it's great to see the first production facility underway," says Russ Davis, President of Organix, in a press release. "When combined with an anaerobic digester, we are confident that we address nearly all significant issues associated with managing dairy solids including ammonia capture, runoff, leachate, methane reduction, dust, climate change, odor and more. We are raising the bar far beyond the outdated simple compost model to create a new dairy facility standard—the renewable peat replacement 'bog.'"

RePeat, says Davis, has generated "considerable interest" among nurseries, landscape companies, soil blenders and horticultural users across the United States. ::CSRwire.com and ::Organix