Growing Media Europe LCA Platform

Calculating the environmental impact of growing media products

Growing Media Europe (GME) is an international non-profit organization representing the producers of growing media and soil improvers at European level. Growing media, sometimes called potting soils or substrates, are materials other than soil in situ in which plants and mushrooms are grown.

Blonk started a cooperation with GME in 2019 to set up an Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Platform, making it easy and accessible for their members and any other stakeholder to perform environmental footprint studies for growing media products.

The GME LCA Platform is an online tool that brings together the Growing Media Environmental Footprint Guidelines (GMEF guidelines) and an LCA database. Access to the platform is managed on a license base. 

LCA guideline and database for growing media

The first component of this Platform was the development of an LCA guideline (GMEF guidelines) for the growing media sector in Europe following guidance from the European Product Environmental Footprint (PEF). Besides that, an LCA database has been developed. This database contains most common growing media constituents allowing users to calculate the environmental footprint of growing media mixes. 

Online LCA Tool

After the development and release of the GMEF LCA guidelines, Blonk developed an online LCA Tool which allows growing media companies to make environmental calculations for their growing media mixes in a simple and intuitive way. The tool is available for both GME members and non-members. For license inquiries please contact us. 

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