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The best thing about coir is what it replaces.
Horticulture's default substrate is peat, and peat comes out of bogs that took thousands of years to form. Coir is husk left over from a harvest that was happening anyway.
The substitution
Peat is mined. Coir is left over.
This is the whole argument, and it does not need embellishing. One material is extracted from a carbon sink that cannot be rebuilt in a human lifetime. The other is agricultural residue.
Inside the plant
Three loops that close on themselves.
A coir plant can be run wastefully — flushing wash water into a field, burning diesel to dry, dumping fibre. We designed ours not to.
Water
Wash water carries the salt we strip out of the pith. It goes to an effluent treatment plant, through settling, aeration and filtration, and returns to the wash tanks — cutting fresh water draw substantially rather than discharging brine onto land.
Fuel
The dryer runs on a biomass furnace fired with our own coir fibre waste and coconut shell. The material that would otherwise be a disposal problem is the thing that dries the next batch.
Residue
Fine dust and short fibre that suit no product go into the compost windrows. Coconut shell becomes charcoal feedstock. What leaves the site as waste is packaging, and we are working that number down too.
"Sustainable" on a substrate bag usually means the material was renewable. It should also mean the factory behaved itself.
Coir's reputation is not spotless, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Badly run coir operations discharge saline wash water into groundwater, dry with diesel, and ship substrate halfway around the world that was never washed to the conductivity claimed on the label.
The material is only as good as the plant it came out of. That is why our conductivity readings are printed per batch rather than quoted as a range, why the wash water goes through treatment before it goes anywhere else, and why the dryer burns husk instead of fuel oil.
Local impact
A market for something that used to be burned.
Coconut husk along this coast has historically been a nuisance. It is bulky, it does not rot quickly, and the common disposal method is to burn it — which wastes the material and puts smoke over the villages doing it.
A processing plant turns that nuisance into a payment. Growers and copra units nearby get a price for husk they were previously paying to get rid of, and the collection radius stays short enough that the transport does not eat the benefit.
| Husk sourcing radius | Within Udupi and Uttara Kannada districts |
|---|---|
| Wash water | Treated and recycled on site |
| Dryer fuel | Own biomass residue |
| Mineral fertiliser in compost | None |
| Batch analysis | Published per consignment |
| Retained samples | Held 12 months |
Certification
We list certifications as they are granted, not as they are applied for. Ask us for the current status of any of these and we will tell you exactly where it stands.
Switching from peat?
Coir behaves differently under irrigation and feeds differently. Tell us what you are running now and we will help you plan the transition rather than just sell you a pallet.