For Peat's Sake, a Renewable Replacement
by Jasmin Malik Chua, Jersey City, USA on 09.19.07
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 We are raising the bar far beyond the outdated simple compost model to create a new dairy facility standard—the renewable peat replacement 'bog.'"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
See also: ::How to Green Your Gardening
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They should call it Poo-peat. The fiber content will be mainly from toilet paper and the brown color.... You know the rest.
Odd title for this article. Isn't most peat (at least the vast majority used in the US) by definition renewable?
"Isn’t there a shortage of peatland in Canada? Isn’t harvesting peat moss depleting these areas of wetlands?
No. There are more than 270 million acres of peatlands in Canada. Of that, only one in 6,000 acres (or .016 percent) is being used for peat harvesting. Canadian sphagnum peat moss is a sustainable resource. Annually, peat moss accumulates at more than 70 times the rate it is harvested. Harvested bogs are returned to wetlands so the ecological balance of the area is maintained."
from http://www.peatmoss.com/pm-efaq.php
JL, I never knew that DAIRY COWS used toilet paper ;-)
btw, these digested solid residuals are also currently being made into seed starter pots (as seen on "Dirty Jobs w/ Mike Rowe")
@RC: Peat bogs take hundreds of years to form; hardly renewable. They're also carbon sinks, with the potential to store carbon indefinitely because peat doesn't decompose in those wet, airless, and acidic conditions.
But peat is mined by extensively draining bog systems, which not only releases stored carbon dioxide but also negatively impacts wildlife, especially through dessication in amphibians. Harvested sites also rarely return to functional ecosystems.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/j632633631v14u6p/
http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=20158989
http://www.gret-perg.ulaval.ca/Mazerolle2003.pdf
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1523-1739.1994.08040943.x
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/77003216/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
http://rparticle.web-p.cisti.nrc.ca/rparticle/AbstractTemplateServlet?journal=cjb&volume=78&year=&issue=&msno=b99-186&calyLang=fra
etc. etc.
Why not consider coco peat. It is a by-product obtained during the extraction of fiber from coconut husks. It is widely used in greenhouses and nurseries in India and is starting to be exported to the US as a renewable peat replacement. Till a few years ago this used to be discarded till it's utility as an inert growing medium was discovered.
Some more info could be found here
http://thiraviyamcocopeat.com/what-is-cocopeat.htm