Horticulture pot recycling: Making it happen

Interested in starting a recycling program in your region? Then the person you need to talk to is Steve Cline at Missouri Botanical Garden. He has created perhaps the most successful horticultural pot recycling program in U.S. This past year, the program collected more than 100,000 pounds of horticultural plastics.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll print Steve’s answers to questions I asked when researching recycling for Project: Green in Garden Center Magazine.

How did you get started?
In 1998, we had kind of an innocent beginning. I wrote a grant application to two counties’ local waste management groups. The purpose of grants is to stimulate reuse, recycling and diversion from landfills. When we deposit materials in landfills, a certain amount of the tax we pay is devoted to grant programs. I received enough to start a collection. We collected in a portion of our parking lot. That made me real popular, I can tell you. Pots take up a lot of space if you don’t stack them. I think it lasted three weeks, just on weekends, and we collected roughly 10,000 pounds.

We gave incentives at first, giving a little plant or a ticket to the garden to those who brought in pots. We don’t need to do that anymore.

We collected whole pots, shipped them to a recycler who would grind them and would send them to be made into new pots.

We grew in the number of pots we collect each year -- started with 10,000 pounds, then jumped to 40,000, and this year we collected over 100,000.

The one year we did not collect, because we didn’t get funding, we still had people drop things off and yell about the program.

What do you think needs to happen for this program to be repeated in other areas?
I’ve had a lot in inquiries from botanic gardens. I think the Morton Arboretum is going to put something together. My guess is that they will work with Chicago Botanic Garden.

What would you suggest to a garden center that wants to recycle its pots, but doesn’t know how to go about it?
Those interested in being environmental would save their pots and their customers’ pots then seek recyclers that will take them. They aren’t all over. That’s why we get inquiries within our region within a couple hundred miles. The sooner we can put programs like ours in major metropolitan areas, the better. Those that are interested and are located in remote areas, I would suggest to collect and store the pots, then wait for when an opportunity comes in.

I think Monrovia has a good example. They have trucks shipping all over the place, and ask their customers to save plastic to ship back. Growers like Monrovia could be the intermediaries for retailers. I suggest retailers talk with their grower groups.

-- Carol

Comments

[Garth Conrad]

As a landscape designer pushing for sustainability, dealing with our industry’s by-products is one key to cleaning up our act. The problem with containers is that we do treat them as a by-product. If we look to nature as the best example of sustainability, we find no loose ends. The Cradle-to-Cradle design protocol (where everything is either biological/compostable and feeds nature, or is a technical nutrient kept out of nature in closed, infinitely recyclable loops) has a fundamental element in its idea of Product of Service. If you make something, and it can’t return to the environment as food for life, you own it for life. If you produce a plant in a container, that container is your responsibility. When the consumer is through with the container, you take it back, ideally to recycle it back into your product offering. It is your burden as part of your product. All those nursery trucks go back to the nursery empty. What better incentive to create a better (environmentally positive) container than to force nurseries to deal with all they produce. I applaud Monrovia for doing it right.

Why do we need a third party to collect somebody else’s cast off? Now, if only we could get bacteria to eat old greenhouse film, we’d be getting greener still.

[Paul Sokal]

We've tried recycling containers here in western Vermont and our recycler wants us to clean the containers first.
We trialed cleaning containers for re-use a few years ago and found the labor to clean and disinfect containers was more expensive than the cost of buying new containers.

[B RINKENBERGER]

WE ARE IN CENTRAL ILL. WE COLLECTED MORE THAN A SEMI LOAD OF PLASTIC NURSERY POTS OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS. WE PACKED THEM TIGHT ON PALLETS 6 TO 7' HIGH. WE FINALLY FOUND A RECYCLER THAT WOULD PICK THEM UP. HIS NAME IS JOHN MIRACLE. 618-544-2300