Boglands are being denuded for peat export

By Michael Viney. Irish Times.

Peatmoss has been the mainstay of horticulture, amateur and professional, over much of the developed world. It is said that a single cubic metre of extracted peat will eventually release some 50kg of carbon dioxide; this is only a latter-day calculation, to be set beside concern for peatland’s special wildlife and ecosystems.

Sphagnum peat is still a main ingredient in the two-million cubic metres of growing media that Bord na Móna sells annually, mostly to the UK and Western Europe, in the Shamrock-branded products taken over a decade ago by the US multi-national Scott Company. Yet, as part of its “New Contract with Nature”, announced as policy last year, Bord na Móna has joined the Growing Media Initiative, so vigorously promoted by the UK’s Horticultural Trade Association, with government support, and backed by big national DIY stores such as B Q. Bord na Móna’s membership of the GMI commits it to “working towards 90 per cent peat reduction in the UK horticulture retail market”, as urged by Britain’s Biodiversity Action Plan.

Indeed, it hopes to reach 60 per cent reduction in the UK retail compost bags by the end of the year.

It will not be cutting into any new bogs. It has been conserving and restoring for nature some of those still untouched, and helping to create wilderness areas in its oldest cutaways. While diversifying now into other energy initiatives, such as growing algae for biofuel, it is shaving away the last of its great midland peat-plains. Bord na Mona’s waste composting centre at Kilberry, near Monasterevan in Co Kildare, is the largest of its kind in Ireland. Here, it takes in huge quantities of redundant shrubbery, brown wheely-bin waste, spent brewery barley, sawdust, discarded supermarket fruit and veg, and so on– all great organic stuff – much of it for the Shamrock peat-free sowing and potting compost.

Bord na Móna may have erased a great share of Ireland’s raised bogs, but its New Contract with Nature and new R D initiatives seems a promising national example of treating all manner of waste as a resource.

Friends of the Irish Environment claim that peat extraction allegedly for export to countries where extraction is illegal and “on a huge scale, with no planning permission or environmental impact assessment”. These times could again be hard on nature, with any sort of enterprise, income or cheap fuel supply being seen as having prior claim.

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