Unearthing Peat’s Potential

You may know peat as a gardening soil amendment, a heating source or insulation material, but Latvians are exploring other uses for this prized natural resource. Exports of peat and peat products contributed €325,03 million to the Latvian economy in 2025 alone*. Could this figure grow with the appearance of more added-value products on the market?

The House of Peat: a One-Stop-Shop for Learning about Peat

One of the people working to broaden the perception of peat is artist and researcher Edgars Ameriks . His workshop occupies a once-derelict 1980s industrial building in Kalnciems, nestled between a peat bog and a river. Once fully renovated, the complex will open to curious visitors as the House of Peat – an educational space, studio and gallery exploring peat’s wider possibilities. But why is Ameriks so into peat you might ask?

In the 1990s, Ameriks’s father founded a peat-processing company, giving Edgars an early opportunity to observe and take part in the work. Later, Edgars joined the company as a marketer. However, instead of taking what he calls an “aggressive” approach to marketing – printing posters, plastering trams with advertising and the like – he took what he deems a more cultural route.

For example, Edgars created collages from peat and spelled out words with it, incorporating them into brochures. “I wanted the content to be informative in an interesting and engaging way, displaying peat as a resource that can be used to create things,” he explains.

Since he had access to peat at home, he himself began experimenting and discovered new uses for it. Edgars’s first creation was a plant pot that went on to win awards. Eventually, he began organizing artist workshops, gaining valuable feedback on the material as it was new to most participants.

The fact that peat is so little understood is its greatest value, believes Edgars. Traditional uses of peat fail to reveal its beauty, but he has succeeded in creating an array of materials that display its layers, similarly to what you see in stone.

“You can polish it. It visualizes climate change – you can see when it rained a lot and when the bog experienced fires. Biologists could read it like a map and spot specific plants,” he explains.

Producing such materials requires profound knowledge of the bog as the right peat is only acquired at a certain depth. It is then processed and dried. For now, production remains small-scale.

Edgars envisions a future in which Latvia no longer just exports peat to Europe’s greenhouses only to buy back the tomatoes grown in it. Along with further developing new applications for the peat, he imagines a wind farm rising from the depleted peat bog, with neighboring greenhouses creating a closed-loop local food production system. The House of Peat will tell the story of the peat from bog to greenhouse and beyond.