Enough plastic plant pots: let’s turn gardening green
Is there anything more thrilling than the year’s first proper trip to the garden centre? Apart from Avengers:
Endgame obviously, which has had so many five-star reviews that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is trending on Tripadvisor as the hottest destination of summer 2019.
By “proper trip” I mean actually buying lovely things: mixed Bellis, cheerful Viola, a fiery orange Crocosmia and a new Plumbago to replace the one the dogs ate. I stocked up on all the bee and butterflyfriendly varieties, too: Achillea,
Salvia, Verbena.
After digging a lot of holes that weren’t quite deep enough – they never are, so all my plants sit atop slightly exasperating mounds – Gertrude Jekyll herself could not have felt prouder than I did.
Until I surveyed the
collateral damage; a mound of black plastic pots and trays that can’t be recycled because they contain carbon pigment, which infrared recycling machines can’t identify and so reject.
There are an estimated 500 million pots in circulation every year. They’re usually made from high density polyethylene (HDPE) or polypropylene, and
are harder to recycle than the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) from which plastic drinks bottles are made.
My tiny garden shed is full of them. Everyone’s garden shed is full of them: Which? did a survey a few years ago and found every household has 39 redundant pots. That few?
It seems crazy. It is crazy. The National Trust has declared war on the plastic plant pot, vowing to replace environmentally unfriendly containers by 2022.
Options include pots that are (gasp!) a different colour, like taupe, and pots made from the pulp of recycled paper, which degrade in the ground.
Some nurseries already sell seedlings in paper pots – it’s up to us gardeners to exert pressure on suppliers who don’t. As we’ve seen from so many other spheres, it’s concerted people power that gets results.
If those of us who care so passionately about tending our own little patch of ground don’t widen our horizons to include the rest of Mother Earth, who will?