Plant Pot Recycling?

Question

I recently started working at a greenhouse/nursery and noticed how many plant pots get thrown away and how many we use. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on what we could do, like start a program and have people be able to bring them back or something, but what would we do with them after we had them if we couldnt use them again? anyway please help me with ideas.

Answer 1

Great question!

Other than reusing and then recycling - I personally don't have any brilliant answers for the volume you are talking about.  When I worked at an arboretum we did our best to reuse them - for other plants, sending home art projects, and as art projects, but still there were lots left over.

I hope you come up with a good plan because way to many go to the dump!!!

Good Luck!

Answer 2

Why not give them to a local park or even garden plot.  I think you should give to another person who will pass it on.

Answer 3

many of the plastic pots are #2 plastic and are recycleable BUT you have a great idea why don't greenhouse's and nurseries take back the pots they sell the plants in resuse is one of the fewest of the three R's used suggest it to the manager

Answer 4

There is a world wide organization called Freecycle. If you go to Freecycle.org you can find a group in your area. You Offer the used pots to the members, they come and get them. This is a free service. No money exchanges hands. Everything on Freecycle is free. Check it out. Freecycle has been around since 2003 and has 4,378 groups with 5,154,000 members across the globe. The purpose of Freecycle is to keep usable items out of landfills. I hope this helps.

Answer 5

Many of those pots will survive only a couple uses before needing to be recycled. This is because may of those pots will be left exposed to sunlight and deteriorate.

The sunlight if they get it, can kill most organisms we would not want on them. But we can not distinguish between containers that have been sun cured vs those that have been left in contact with soil. So, reuse is going to be very impractical.

We can use a ball of soil wrapped with jute or hemp fibre instead of plastic pots, and that way we can substantially eliminate the problem. This strategy still requires a larger tray to  carry the plants in these new packages, but these trays stay with the business, are reused multiple times. We get sterility by using a very thin plastic film that is recycled.

As long as we are using plastic pots, the best we can do is use recycling from customer sources.

We would have too much difficulty trying to reuse, with breakage and contamination.