Tag: plastic

Plastic-free gardening

How to buy plants without the plastic

sallynex

I love to buy plants. What gardener doesn’t? It’s what gardening is all about: that magpie-like delight in tracking down a coveted treasure, the thrill of spotting the perfect plant for the gap you wanted to fill in a border.

Only trouble is, with every plant I buy the stack of plastic pots in my garage gets even taller. And since I plant not only my own garden, but bits and pieces of four other gardens I look after, it is already well above my head and definitely at the teetering stage.

Our addiction to plastic – or rather the horticultural industry’s dependence on it – means that whenever you buy a plant, it comes with a side order of plastic pot. It’s all very well pledging to buy no new plastic for the garden; but what about the plastic you don’t buy?

So for the last couple of seasons, this is one of the main areas where I’ve been concentrating my efforts to reduce the plastic in my garden. And I’ve come up with my own rules for buying plants without the plastic.

It does involve a certain amount of self-denial. We have become used to being able to pop into the garden centre and pick up plants whenever we feel like it, 365 days of the year, and plastic is what makes this on-demand availability possible.

Just as with supermarkets, round-the-clock availability divorces us from the natural turning of the seasons. We have lost our feel for the right season to plant and sow. And for gardeners, that’s never a good thing.

Plants you put in the ground in, say, summer need massive amounts of watering to keep them alive, let alone growing (in last year’s summer, they’d be goners). Plant in autumn, and through winter into spring, and the ground is consistently damp and occasionally fairly warm; plants are largely dormant, so they can concentrate on root systems before they need to find the extra energy for top growth.

Autumn, winter and spring are also the best times of year to strike cuttings, sow seeds and divide your existing perennials to make new plants. All requiring no plastic at all.

So I have been confining my plant acquisitions to the six months between September and March. It has taken every ounce of my willpower – I’d never noticed before quite  how many plant fairs and flower shows take place during summer, the very worst time to plant, and every last desirable plant on offer sitting in its plastic pot. But I have been  Very Good and will walk past the lot of them (well, I might stop for a moment and gaze a little wistfully).

Because from here on in I will buy plants only if they are plastic free. And – with the occasional exception, such as stumbling across Hairy Pot plants in the few nurseries and garden centres which stock them – that means no impulse buys from garden centres or nurseries or plant fairs or flower shows.

I console myself with the fact that my plants will be happier and will establish better. And I’m going to have a whole lot of fun with raising plants myself, the old-fashioned way, with all the deep, long-lasting satisfaction that comes with that achievement. And that’s something you can’t buy in any garden centre.

Here are my five ways to buy plants without the plastic:

Buy bare root: By far the best way to do it, with the easiest access to the widest range of varieties (and it’s increasing all the time). Available November to March, you can buy plants bare root from many mail order nurseries and from the wholesale nursery Howard Nurseries (based in Norfolk). Hedging, roses, fruit canes, strawberries and (for some reason that escapes me) wallflowers are all routinely sold bare root at garden centres throughout winter, too.

Buy mail order from plastic-aware nurseries: Nurseries like Bluebell Cottage Nurseries in Cheshire take plants out of their pots before sending them to you. They wrap in wax paper or newspaper, pack them carefully and they arrive without a pot for you to deal with (the original is usually re-used back at the nursery).

Divide existing perennials: Increasing your stock without accumulating extra plastic just takes a little patience. Dividing gives you the quickest results: chop clumps of perennials into two, three or four pieces in autumn or spring and replant each chunk for a new plant.

Raise from cuttings: If you have a sympathetic friend or relative with a particularly desirable plant in their garden, ask if you can take a cutting to pot up at home. You have several chances for taking cuttings throughout the year: in spring or autumn take softwood or shoot cuttings; in summer you can peel away a heeled or semi-ripe cutting; and in winter you can propagate shrubs, including roses, from hardwood cuttings, probably the easiest of the lot.

Raise from seed: The joy of persuading a seed to germinate is a very special thing. Most of us sow a few annuals and vegetables – but you can sow perennials, shrubs and trees from seed too, and it’s great fun to try. Plunder seed swaps and membership schemes like those run by the RHS and the Hardy Plant Society for sometimes quite unusual varieties to add to your collection (you get loads of plants for your money, too, so it’s a lot cheaper to stock your garden this way). Raising plants from seed gives you a connection with them you don’t have any other way, too: I currently have a huge cordyline, some 12-15ft tall and mature enough to flower and fruit, which I raised from seed myself: it would be a fairly ordinary plant bought with its pot on in a garden centre, but because I have raised it from a baby it is my pride and joy.

I will be going into each of these options in more detail in the coming months: watch this space!

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recycling

Plastic pot recycling: the latest

sallynex

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.

recycling, Research

Where to recycle plastic #4: Pass it on

sallynex

So far I think I’ve established that your ability to dispose of the plastic in your garden responsibly kind of depends on where you live. You may be in the lucky 49% of the UK whose council collects rigid plastic from the kerbside. Or you may have one of the UK’s rare plastic recycling plants in your neighbourhood, in which case your local garden centre may have set up a pot collection scheme in partnership with them.

Unfortunately neither of those applies to me: so I’m stuck with trundling 30 miles along the A30 to Exeter and back to visit my nearest big city tip if I want to recycle my surplus pots.

Unless, of course, I avoid recycling them altogether and just pass them on.

My stockpile of plastic pots is perfectly serviceable: there are just too many of them (especially since I moved to non-plastic alternatives). So I began to wonder if I could find other gardeners who could use them instead: allotment holders, perhaps, or community gardeners, CSA volunteers and the organisers of school gardening clubs.

I started with an ad on Freecycle, there are other swap communities too where you can advertise unwanted but useful stuff, like Freegle and Preloved (though this last is mainly for buying & selling second-hand, it accepts ads for free stuff too.)

It was the second or third time I’ve tried this, and the results this time were much the same. A little flurry of responses: three, on this occasion. Followed by… well, basically nothing, as nobody turned up when they said they were going to.

Perhaps it’s just where I live. Or perhaps community gardeners are far too busy to do things like logging on to Freegle in the hope that someone will be advertising pots today. Anyway: as a strategy for tackling the teetering piles of plastic pots in my garden this is hit-and-miss at best.

So, I thought, perhaps I should take my pots to needy gardeners rather than waiting for them to find me. The first people I thought of were community, school and therapy gardens. Only trouble is, it’s hard to know where to start in getting in touch with them to find out whether they could use the contents of my shed without the time-consuming fuss of ringing round each and every one.

Enter…. the Free Pot Swap Shop!

Actually it’s not a swap at all really (I just liked the name and Noel Edmonds was an indelible part of my childhood). It’s just a place for anyone who wants to get their hands on other people’s pots to let other gardeners know about it.

As soon as I’ve collected a few responses I will start a page on this website with a list by county of any organisation or individual who is willing to take donations of used pots, trays, modules or any other gardening equipment.

After that it’s up to gardeners with donations to contact the organisation to arrange a drop-off.

If you are interested in receiving donations, please fill in the form below. Alternatively you can get in touch with me on Twitter (@sallynex or using the hashtag #gardeningwithoutplastic).

If you are interested in passing on your pots I will post a link here and more prominently on the website as soon as the page is up.

Please clean donated pots first and make sure they are in good working order. Thank you!

 


 

recycling, Research

Where to recycle plastic #3: National collection schemes

sallynex

I got quite excited when I heard that there were people making a business out of going round collecting surplus plastic pots from garden centres.

What a great match. Manufacturer seeking recycled plastic to make stuff seeks garden centre with customers looking to get rid of plastic mountain: everyone’s a winner.

Except…. as it turns out, it’s not that easy.

There are two main companies who have tried this, as far as I can see: and both have come unstuck.

Ashortwalk is a Cornish company (the name comes from the fact that it is “a short walk” from the sea), founded in 2003 by ex Dyson designer Daniel Dicker. It is the company behind recycled plastic Ecopots and also makes recycled plastic plant labels, plant holders, bird feeders, sundials, house numbers. Recycling depends on people actually buying the recycled products too, so i would urge you to take a look at what’s on offer – a lot of it is really very funky stuff.

It didn’t take Dan long to realise there was a massive unused resource sitting about in garden sheds which he could tap into. We all see our garden pots as a nuisance; Dan sees them as raw material.

“Old plastic plant pots are not collected,” he says. “They have no value. They are light, but shipping is expensive; they are just not viable for recycling. But, if you create a product that uses them… well now it is financially viable to recycle this product.”

So he set up another company, Pot to Product, to collect this resource. The idea is that garden centres sign up, customers offload their plastic pot surplus to the garden centre, and Pot to Product comes along to pick them all up and take them to Cornwall and turn them into more pots, bird tables, plant labels and sundials.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, global economics has put its great clumsy boot in it and kicked it all to smithereens. I spoke to Chris at Ashortwalk, who told me the value of recycled plastic is at an all-time low, just at the time when the cost of diesel to transport it from garden centres to Cornwall has risen to an all-time high. It is, quite simply, more expensive to collect it than the recycled plastic is worth.

He said China’s recent decision to stop taking in the world’s rubbish has played a part too: labour costs in China are low, so they can afford to sort the many different kinds of plastic you get in garden pots and trays. UK labour costs are (relatively) high: sending the price of collecting, sorting and recycling garden plastic up even further.

Officially, the scheme is ‘suspended’: but it will take some fairly major economic upheaval to change the maths.

The other company that has dabbled with the idea of collecting plastic pots for recycling is Axion Recycling, a Manchester-based company which specialises in turning the steady stream of waste we pour out of our homes and lives into new stuff. Mainly, they recycle cars; but in 2011 they trialled collecting and recycling plastic plant pots. The scheme was along the same lines as Pot to Product: they teamed up with garden centres across the North of England and went round collecting surplus plant pots to take back to the recycling depot. It seems to have been short-lived: I can find no reference to it beyond 2011, and I haven’t (yet) been able to find anyone in Axion who can let me know how it went. I suspect it may have fallen foul of the same problem: the economics simply don’t stack up.

And that’s it. National schemes are just too difficult to be a practical solution. So the only option for our poor garden centres is to go to the trouble of setting up their own bespoke deal with a nearby plastics recycling centre (if they are fortunate enough to have such a thing) to collect customer’s pots. It’s not impossible, and some have – the garden centre in the previous post, for example.

But it’s hardly core business for garden centres, and it’s a problem not of their making in any case. So it seems unfair to demand that they.pour resources into recycling: better, surely, to put those resources into pressuring their wholesalers to use recycled (at least) or biodegradable (ideally) pots instead.

Back to the drawing board, then. Next solution: passing it on…

Research

Where to recycle garden plastic #1: Council tips

sallynex

After you’ve been gardening for only a short time you’ll find you begin to accumulate a little eddy of plastic pots, trays, compost bags and other detritus. A lot you can re-use in the garden: by far the best way of dealing with the stuff as it’s the most efficient way to keep it out of landfill sites and our oceans.

But the more you garden, the more pots you seem to have. They arrive on every plant you buy, people give them to you, and a lot of the time (compost sacks for example) you buy them even though you’d rather not. Once you’ve got through a few seasons the eddies have turned into tidal waves and you find you are drowning in more plastic than you will ever use.

The only possible way to stop this happening is to reduce the amount of plastic arriving in your garden in the first place, by raising plants yourself from seeds or cuttings, or sourcing your plants from nurseries and garden centres who use biodegradable pots or sell bare-root. This isn’t easy, though it is possible: I’m building a listing of places you can source plastic-free plants from, so more on this later.

In the meantime, of course, you’re stuck with the pots. Use what you can: but unless you want to turn your garden into a storage depot for plastic pots, you will have to get rid of the rest (promising yourself all the while that you will not replace them with more). And that means recycling.

You have three main options:

1: Council tips

Just under half – 49% – of councils in the UK offer a kerbside recycling service for rigid plastic – that’s plastic plant pots, trays and modules.

Lucky you if you live in one of those enlightened places: I never have. My local council doesn’t collect anything but clear plastic bottles, along with the other 51% of councils in the country.

Many small local tips can’t deal with them either as the only commonly recycled type of plastic is PET1 (the kind plastic drinks bottles are made out of) and most pots are PET2 (for a guide to which plastics are which in the garden, see here).

However larger tips will often take garden plastic – so it’s worth seeking them out.

Look for “rigid plastic” on the “what can we recycle” page on your council tip’s website. Friends of the Earth provide a very handy search tool on their website where you can find the nearest local tip to you which can take rigid plastic. Go to www.recyclenow.com/local-recycling, click on “where to recycle a specific item”, then click “plastic packaging” then “plant pots”. Click “continue” and it will ask for your postcode so it can tell you your nearest rigid plastic waste recycling centre.

They are not very numerous. In the whole of Somerset, Dorset and Hampshire I found just three, in Wimborne, Shepton Mallet and Andover.

My closest one is in Exeter, across the border in Devon (a county where almost all the tips in major towns seem to recycle bulky/rigid plastic: there is a lot of regional variation, it seems). This is a 56.8 mile round trip taking me about an hour and 20 minutes of driving plus time actually spent at the tip.

I am not sure how the environmental accounting works out, but it strikes me that you are undoing a lot of the good you are achieving by recycling your garden plastic by emitting that much pollution into the air as you drive there and back.

Yet another argument, it would seem to me, for reducing and eventually eliminating plastic from the garden rather than trying to use new plastic then recycle.

Anyway: I rang the nice lady at the Exeter recycling centre to ask what, exactly, they can take out of my garden.

She said there is no truth in the rumours that black pots are not recyclable whereas brown and green ones are; she said it really doesn’t matter what colour your pots are, black, green, pink or diarrhoea coloured, they all go in the same skip.

The pots have to be clean: so I’m afraid you must give them a quick dunk in a bucket of water first to wash off any excess compost. Time-consuming, but then you won’t be doing it forever as you’ll eventually be banishing plastic from your garden so you won’t need to. Right?

But what about non-rigid plastic: compost sacks, for example?

There is currently no facility for recycling these. They are made of polypropylene (PP 5 in the triangle) and therefore will have to go into the landfill skip along with the torn fruit netting and the polystyrene bedding trays. This is another one for my lengthening list of Things to Investigate Further: watch this space.

(Option 2 – taking your pots to the local garden centre – follows shortly…)