Gardeners facing fresh pressure to stop using peat

But professional growers still say there is nothing like peat. And the garden products business feels hard done by because nobody else in Europe seems to be bothered about saving peat, meaning the UK effort will be insignificant however successful it is.

Defra Secretary Hilary Benn will announce the new campaign when he visits Kew Gardens on Monday.

He will say a campaign to reduce gardeners' consumption of peat by 90 per cent between 1999 and 2010 has failed – although massive publicity for the case against peat has reduced the original figure by 55 per cent and the Horticultural Trades Association always said 90 per cent was unrealistic.

In 1999, the Government's arguments were about biodiversity. It stopped all peat digging on sites of special scientific interest – including Thorne Moore, near Doncaster. Some peat is still dug in Cumbria but most is imported.

Now the emphasis is on how digging up peat releases carbon dioxide – thought to cause "global warming" – and the new campaign comes under the Defra policy Action On CO2.

Mr Benn has considered legislation but will say he is prepared to go along with one last voluntary effort. Defra has supplied the industry with waterproof point-of-sale material, a training leaflet for garden centre staff and articles for the press, to persuade the public to buy alternatives to peat, which are generally more expensive.

The Horticultural Trades Association is going along with all this but is reluctant to stop supplying peat when customers still want it. And it says the minor contribution of the peat industry to global warming is only important in British politics. The Irish even burn it in power stations.

The government campaign is directed at the bagged products used by amateur gardeners, who account for two thirds of our peat consumption. The rest is used in professional horticulture.

Graham Ward, growers' spokesman in the NFU in Yorkshire, said yesterday: "We do get nagged about it and we have moved to different mulches and growing mediums for some purposes. But for small plants in pots, nothing has the buffering and retention properties of peat.

"Of 20 alternatives coming on the market in a year, maybe five are acceptable – but you need an entirely different watering and nutrition regime and the responsibility for experimentation has been dumped on amateur gardeners. They lose plants because they are not working with peat but they blame themselves. I hear about their problems all the time when I am on the NFU stand at the Great Yorkshire Show."