Soil You Can Feel Good About

As “soil huggers”, we at Organic Mechanics believe every day is Earth Day. Why contain a kindredship to the land that nurtures us to just one day—or a week or a month? We’ve been advocating for Planet Earth for nearly two decades—its soils and waters, its forests and landscapes. Every cubic inch of it deserves our care and attention. That’s why we do what we do— provide products that sustain our gardens and landscapes with minimal environmental impact and advocate for ecological landscapes however we can.

Fun fact! We’re the OG in the peat-free potting soil space. Since our first year in 2006, we’ve used compost and coconut coir to replace peat moss in our blends. In fact, we launched the first peat-free, OMRI-listed, compost-based retail potting soil in the U.S.! In 2009 we were the first soil company to use rice hulls to replace perlite—an expanded siliceous rock— saving even more energy to make our blends, since rice hulls are a natural by-product of farming rice here in the U.S. We began manufacturing products containing biochar since 2010, incorporating it into our Biochar Blend and custom soils for landscape installations.

We all live on this earth together. Companies and manufacturers have a responsibility to pursue processes and practices that are both sustainable and regenerative. Organic Mechanics has had a tremendous impact on the environment over the last 18 years. We may be a small company, but our ecological impact is huge! Or, should we say really quite tiny? What we mean to say is that we have aimed to do right by the environment, treading softly and enriching landscapes along the way.

And we can prove it. We opened our files, grabbed our calculators and computed how many tons of this and cubic yards of that we’ve contributed to the earth’s betterment.

Why We’re Peat-Free

But first, we’ll explain why we are a peat-free company. Peat moss has been used for decades in the horticulture industry to increase the water-holding capacity and aeration of growing media. Peat moss comes from bogs occurring mostly in the colder regions of the Northern Hemisphere, where it has been sequestering carbon for millennia. According to this Oregon State University Extension article, peat bogs cover just 5% of the Earth’s surface yet contain more carbon than all of the world’s forests combined. Harvesting peat from bogs releases this carbon back into the atmosphere where it contributes to the warming climate. The harvesting process also damages and even destroys large swaths of habitat that feed and shelter native insects, birds, amphibians, and small mammals.

For those reasons, we’ve chosen to eliminate peat from our manufacturing process. We instead rely on sustainable and earth-friendly options that have a reduced carbon footprint. We not only care about what goes into our soils, but also care about how it gets there.

Now onto the numbers!

Compost & Coconut Coir

We use compost and coconut coir as peat replacements in our soils. Compost is a key building block for productive gardens, fields and forests. It provides the same aeration and water-holding functions as peat, but with much less of an impact on the environment. Coconut coir is another peat alternative in the soils manufacturing process. While it’s also a harvest product, coconut coir is considered to be a more renewable resource because it grows to a harvestable stage more quickly than a replanted peat bog, and it’s the last by-product in a series of products harvested from each coconut.

Using the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator, the amount of compost and coir that Organic Mechanics has supplied since 2006 is the equivalent of:

2,334,340 gallons gasoline consumed
1,369,534,469 smartphones charged
4,095 average homes’ electricity use for 1 year
343,025 trees planted for 10 years, or 24,221 acres of forest
14,408,000 pounds of waste recycled instead of landfilled

And that’s just a portion of our impact! Let’s talk next about biochar.

Biochar

Biochar is a buzzword in gardening circles nowadays but the material and its use in agriculture have been around for millennia. It’s a carbon-rich product that is created by burning organic material in the absence of oxygen, a process known as pyrolysis. Biochar is used to help retain moisture and nutrients, and its structure also creates spaces for beneficial biology to aggregate. Biochar’s presence also helps plants to form dense roots, which in turn leads to plants taking up more nutrients. As a bonus, research into the benefits of biochar indicate that it helps plants and soils better resist environmental stressors. All good things! And best yet, it lasts practically forever in the garden as a soil amendment. Apply biochar once and you’ll reap its benefits for decades to come.

Since manufacturing products containing biochar beginning in 2010, Organic Mechanics has supplied the equivalent of:

384,055 gallons gasoline consumed
225,321,221 smartphones charged
674 average homes’ electricity use for 1 year
56,436 trees planted for 10 years, or 3,985 acres of forest
2,370,000 pounds of waste recycled instead of landfilled
2,052,160 pounds of carbon dioxide sequestered