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Very few houseplant buyers, who are mostly aged in their 20s and 30s, seem to be as aware of peat as a finite resource as they are of fossil fuels. But when showing off their green lifestyle on Instagram (to date there are 11.5 million house/indoor plants hashtag posts), few houseplant-aholics realise there is an elephant in the room: the vast majority of houseplants are grown in peat, a nutritious soil-like substance formed from decayed organic matter over time. The mining of peat is now widely condemned as unsustainable, environment-wrecking and carbon-emitting. Like coal or oil, it is effectively a finite resource. It does regenerate, but only forms at a rate of 1mm annually.