KEY POINTS:
The horticultural industry has its own overpackaging problem - common or garden plant pots, spewing out of sheds and littering paths until they eventually get chucked into landfill. Britain gets through 500 million each year.
It's an inglorious secret for a supposedly green industry. Rebecca Matthews-Joyce, environmental adviser to Britain's Royal Horticultural Society, points out that "from an environmental perspective, the true beauty of a plant is its ability to replenish itself without a scrap of waste being generated ... Gardeners, however, are piling up a problem for the future, a plastic-pot mountain that won't rot away".
Tim Mason from wholesale nursery Hillier agrees, and tries to use pots that are at least 90 per cent recycled. He also feels that more can be done to promote biodegradable pots, especially coir ones (from coconuts) for perennials and ornamentals where shoppers might be prepared to pay more.
Petersham Nurseries uses pots made from organic coir grown in Sri Lanka, and other growers are experimenting with pots made from recycled woodchip.
But these remain niche areas. Experimental biodegradable potato and rice-starch pots are apparently too brittle to survive transportation, and so 'sustainable' efforts still focus on degradable pots, where plastic is injected with chemicals to make it degrade.
But this doesn't save any resources and the materials do not return harmlessly to the soil, so they're not very sustainable at all.
An Australian study from 2003 quantified significant energy and greenhouse gas savings associated with recycling polypropylene, the material most pots are made from.
But in most countries we lack mechanisms to gather and sort the pots. Because they are so cheap to produce (in Asia), there is little market in recycling.
In effect, they become single-use packaging and the burden of responsibility gets passed to the consumer.
In which case, we plant-buyers need to make more fuss. The louder we shout, the more prepared the horticultural industry will be to move towards offering more recycling.
So far we've been vocal enough to encourage Wyevale (www.wyevale. co.uk), purveyor of 25 million plants in plastic pots every year, to trial a free recycling service for plant pots at four gardening centres.
This is now being extended to 30 of its largest garden centres.
But all garden centres should now offer a take-back-and-recycle centre for plant pots as standard practice.
Any other response looks a little weedy.
- OBSERVER
