Second Life: Development of sustainable recycled growing media

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This research project will be led by Overland with support of research partner NIAB East Malling and specialist subcontractors: C. Donkin Limited (agronomy, substrate development), Kelsey Farms (strawberry producer). It will investigate the challenges and assess mitigation strategies required for high-quality, low disease risk, sustainable, recycled growing media from spent coir substrate. The project will also develop, comprehensively evaluate and benchmark recycling and production processes in order to reliably standardise the recycled media's biological, chemical and physical properties.Project outputs will provide soft fruit growers in Kent and Medway and the wider horticultural industry with a reliable coir recycling service including automated removal of spent media, recycling/processing to reduce the risk of pathogens, media formulation/standardisation, bagging and delivery to farm ready for use.Soft fruit growers are under increased consumer pressure to reduce their material and labour costs and produce more affordable and sustainable produce. The market demand for affordable, sustainable, and safe recycled coir media is considerable and growing due to consumer demand, and increased costs of virgin coir material, shipping, and labour prices. Slotting directly into existing soft fruit growing practices, our recycled media will allow growers and farmers based in Kent and Medway to reuse their growing media in a low-cost, low-energy, robust process and replace the existing volatile, expensive, and environmentally inefficient global supply chain thereby delivering an improved product at lower cost as part of a circular, sustainable farming system.The proposed solution will address Net-Zero targets through reducing the energy and emissions of shipping virgin coir (9.7 tonnes CO2eq per ha of production) and the waste produced by single-season growing techniques (~60 000 m3 diseased coir bags disposed in K&M yearly). It will reduce costs, ease the labour burden, increase productivity for soft fruit growers, and create a local recycling media production sector to supply UK horticulture with environmentally friendly substrates. The use of recycled coir over virgin will significantly reduce the waste generated, the amount of coir imported, the waste management required, and the energy/carbon footprint of shipping of virgin material.