How Community Groups Can Go Peat-Free - and Why it's Important

Text guide

What is peat?

Peat has formed over millions of years. It builds up very slowly, about 1mm a year. It’s a fantastic habitat for many amazing plants and insects, but it also contains 30% of the world’s soil carbon – even though it only covers 3% of the world’s surface! But that carbon is sent into the atmosphere when we dig up peat, and that contributes to climate change.

Peat also holds water and helps to keep towns safe from flooding.

Without peat filtering water, your water bills will be higher!

And peatlands are incredible for biodiversity with rare and fascinating species, like sundews which are plants that eat insects, bog myrtle, butterwort, and birds like the skylark, golden plover and the meadow pipet.

What choices can you make?

Look carefully at the brand of compost you are buying. The Wildlife Trusts website has a list of retailers that are trying to stop selling peat compost so see this webpage here.

Peat is often used in plug plants and indoor plants. Look at the labels carefully. The Wildlife Trusts has a free guide to going peat free that you can download here. It will even help you to make your own compost!

Find out more about the ban on the sale of peat on our webpage here and consider writing to your MP/MSP/MS/AS to ask them to ban ALL peat sales. See our related guide about writing to your councillors. You could also take our pledge on this page to go peat-free and we can use this to show government that people are concerned about peat and the climate.