Sustainable compost and potting soil marketing: Private gardener preferences

Features and Functions of Multifunctional Urban Agriculture in the Global North: A Review

“…Whenever contamination risk is confirmed, however, strategies may be set in place in order to limit the hazard, including integration of soil amendments or adoption of agronomic practices to reduce plant uptake of the contaminants (Table 3). Whenever UA takes place in potentially contaminated sites, the integration of peat or potting soil may also be an option to overtake contamination (Pennisi et al, 2016(Pennisi et al, , 2017, although at the expenses of increased associated environmental impacts (Dahlin et al, 2019), which on a large-scale could pose at risk the overall sustainability of UA (Meharg, 2016). Alternatives to commercial/potting soils should therefore be considered, these including among others composted urban waste (Shrestha et al, 2020), spent coffee grounds (Cervera-Mata et al, 2019) or biochar (Song et al, 2020), assuming they do not contain further contaminants and are suitable for plant cultivation (Beniston and Lal, 2012;Hardgrove and Livesley, 2016).…”

Consumer Willingness To Pay for Proenvironmental Attributes of Biogas Digestate-Based Potting Soil

“…We started from past research that has demonstrated positive part-worth utilities for various proenvironmental attributes of compost and potting-soil products [22]. This approach builds on the broader research into consumer WTP for proenvironmental products and services.…”

“…We focused on attributes that also pertain to biogas digestate and can be used in communication when selling digestate-based potting soils. Two are especially relevant to the environmentally minded consumer: first, biogas digestate is an organic product that can replace peat in potting soil [22]; second, digestate provides phosphorous that would otherwise often be taken from guano.…”

“…We focused on these attributes because consumers have increasingly become aware of the environmental cost of draining peat land [64], though public perception is divided [65]. So too is the perception of guano, with some consumers favoring it in their potting soil and fertilizer products and others intent on avoiding it [22,64].…”

“…No rational operator would make a significant investment without some expectation of return, which makes it necessary to have reliable estimates of consumer WTP for digestate-based potting soils and their diverse proenvironmental attributes. Past research has established some facts that we can build on; a recent study by [22] revealed the importance to certain consumer segments of proenvironmental attributes such as "peat free", "organic", and "without guano", which is different from how farmers judge biobased fertilizers [23,24] but left open the question of WTP, which forms the research gap on which we build our paper. We use a choice-based approach, since it allows discerning the effects of different attributes and their levels on WTP and thus offers detailed insights, which are valuable both for developing theory as well as for taking decisions on product design and pricing.…”