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Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

I googled peat so you dont have to

Peat is a soft, spongy material made from dead plants that did not fully rot. It forms very slowly in wet, swampy places called bogs

It is used as fuel as well as fertilizer

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It is also a fantastic carbon sink.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/headway/peat-...

"Although peatlands make up just 3 percent of land on Earth, they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined."

Nice it was historically just dug up and the leftovers turned into expensive holiday homes.

If you add enough heat, pressure and (geological) time it becomes coal!

Unfortunately the reverse is also true: polderization and exposing the peat to the air reverses that sink process. Single digit percentage of Dutch greenhouse emissions come from this. Fortunately, they are depolderizing and hopefully much of the Netherlands is given back to the sea so that environmental interests are preserved.

It takes a very long time to form, however. It's mostly another source of carbon that gets added to the atmosphere.

Anybody whose done any amount of gardening or has houseplants is probably familiar with peat. Though its harvest is destructive to the unique peat bog environments it forms

There's a huge push to go peat-free, and I agree 95%.

There are just a few uses for peat that don't have an alternative. I mention this to fellow gardeners because if you go 100% peat-free, you'll end up with an expensive disaster and, out of frustration, may go back to peat entirely.

I think it's not productive to ignore the small corner cases where peat is almost a requirement.

Say more? I've heard coconut coir can sometimes contain salt and has less nutrients but that can be fixed by buying properly processed coir and mixing in something like finished compost. What's irreplaceable about peat?

Most of Netherland used to be peat, but there's almost nothing left now. From about the 10th century onward, it's slowly all been turned into farmland or lakes. Sometimes both. This is the process that really created the country, both geographically and politically.

Some areas used to be strips of water / land, but too much peat was dug out, storms washed the remaining land strips into the water beside it, creating a regular lake. For example some lakes in Giethoorn area were formed like this.

Like most lakes in the NL these tend to be shallow (~1.5-2m depth is common, even the biggest lake -Ijsselmeer- is only about 5..6m in deepest areas).

Ijsselmeer is a different kind of lake; not created by digging out peat, but a (violent) sea inlet that was closed off. The many peat lakes didn't start out as strips of land, but as endless peat swamp. Much of that was drained through drainage ditches and turned into agricultural land. Other parts were dug up for fuel, creating those massive lakes. In the latter case, they sometimes left those strips of land to transport the fuel.

> Ijsselmeer is a different kind of lake; not created by digging out peat, but a (violent) sea inlet that was closed off.

Hmm yes, 'everybody' in the NL is aware of that.

> In the latter case, they sometimes left those strips of land to transport the fuel.

Not really. The turf blocks would be stacked in piles & left to dry for a while. But then often transported by boat (through the newly created channels). The leftover strips of land could be used to have men, or a horse, pull such boats on a rope.

It is also used to give whisky a smokey taste.

pre-industrial peoples in some parts of the world used this material extensively.. some still do

I’ve started referring to the industrialized majority as peoples too

“the South of Market peoples”

It usually holds many times its solid weight in water. If you add load to it by building something on it (without designing around the ground conditions) it can compress to a fraction of its volume, resulting in ground settlements that can be very large.

Can also be used to build a home. Up to 1940 that is how the lowest class in The Netherlands lived. Plaggenhutten, homes made out of peat, straw, manure.

Likely very comfortable on a thermal basis.

Next, google "bog butter" to see one of their more interesting uses.

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