You may have heard that the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) recently brought in ‘taupe’ pots – actually a kind of bilious shade of grey – as an alternative to the ubiquitous black variety which can’t be recycled as sorting machines don’t ‘see’ the colour black.
Taupe pots use a polypropylene completely free of the ‘carbon black’ pigment, so sorting machines should be able to see them and recycle them along with other rigid plastics.
The work goes on to encourage garden centres and nurseries to take up the taupe pots: it’s always been a given that this is going to arrive on shelves gradually, as the current stock of black pots has to be used up first. Fast-growing plugs, like bedding, annuals and vegetable plugs should appear in taupe first, followed by perennials, followed by shrubs and trees which are in containers for longest.
So far Hillier have led the way by having its first commercial crop ready grown in taupe, Other growers are following; Waitrose already has plants in taupe pots on the shelves, and Wyevale Nurseries, Farplants and Bransford Webbs are among other names taking up the new pots. They will be more expensive (of course) but the (smallish) cost rises aren’t expected to appear on plant price tags till 2020.
But…
For the taupe pot initiative to succeed, they have to be not only recyclable, but actually recycled. And there’s the rub.
The British Plastics Federation says 79% of local councils recycle rigid plastic (often referred to as ‘pots, tubs and trays’) at the kerbside.
But trade magazine Horticulture Week took it upon itself to ring 70 local authorities and actually ask them whether they will accept plastic plant pots in kerbside collections.
61 of them – that’s 87% – said they would not accept plastic plant pots at all, whatever colour they were.
The advice is to drive your plastic plant pots to your nearest municipal tip for recycling there (as long as they accept rigid plastic themselves, and as long as the pots are not black, of course). For me, that’s a 1hr 20 minute round trip to Exeter. Which rather cancels out the environmental benefits of recycling the pots in the first place.
The HTA is now lobbying the government to put pressure on councils to accept plant pots alongside rigid plastic food packaging and take them for recycling.
But I can’t help thinking that this underlines the increasingly undeniable fact that recycling is not the answer. It is, at best, the least we can do: but it’s a half-hearted, lily-livered sort of an attempt to turn back the plastic tsunami which floods into our gardens each year.
Even recycled plastic still ends up in landfill or floating about in our oceans anyway: you can only recycle plastic 7-9 times before the fibres become too short and they are useless for recycling further. And that doesn’t even start to address the 70% or so of rigid plastic which is not recycled at all, by anyone, whether there are the facilities to do so or not. And that’s a lot of plastic: there are 500 million new plant pots manufactured every single year.
The only real solution is – as so often – the less easy one that requires real, genuine change. We need to find other ways of doing things which don’t use plastic at all – not even if it’s recycled. Wood, metal, paper, cardboard: materials which biodegrade at the end of their lives, properly, without harming wildlife or polluting our environment. That is the only real way out of this mess: anything else is just a sticking plaster covering more of the same old rubbish.
Gardening without Plastic 