REDUCE, REUSE, REUSE, REUSE

By Eily Schulz, Australian Ecosystems

At Australian Ecosystems, we are always challenging ourselves to improve the sustainability of our operations, from our devotion to native and locally indigenous plants, to our use of recycled water, onsite organics composting, and our reusable plant trays.

We have been operating for 23 years at Melbourne’s Eastern Treatment Plant, which gives us great access to recycled water for growing our stock. We are a multipronged organisation, providing full landscaping services including our nursery plant sales, landscaping construction and maintenance, as well as design of residential landscapes and urban farms through The Sustainable Landscape Company.

We are thrilled to have been nominated as a finalist in the 2021 Premier’s Sustainability Awards, as Industry Leaders in the Waste Reduction & Circular Economy category, for our reusable and recyclable multipack plant trays.

Our nursery began growing native aquatic plants to supply our wetland landscaping operations. Wetlands reduce the sediment and nutrient runoff into Melbourne’s waterways and Port Phillip Bay. During this time, we have grown over 40 million plants, making us realise that single-use plastic pots used by the horticultural industry have the potential to generate large amounts of plastic waste, much of which can potentially end up in landfill. To avoid this waste in our operations, we decided to create our own circular-economy solution that benefits our own planting operations as well as our clients who purchase our plants. Our objective was to replace almost all single-use plastic pots at our nursery with durable, reusable multi-plant trays. In 2013, we designed and developed our own unique moulded trays, manufactured in Melbourne from Polypropylene. The 20-cell x 200cc multi-use tray replaces forestry tubes, and our 12-cell x 600cc trays provide stock similar in size to 150mm pots. This was done in consultation with our planting teams, who benefit from the multi-pack trays as it reduces bending and lifting with individual pots as they trays can be easily clipped onto planting belts. It also cuts down on the clean-up of containers after a massive planting project!

We invested in the design and fabrication of tools that allow us to locally manufacture our injection moulded multi-plant 200cc and 600cc trays and purchased a hydraulic popper machine that lifts the plant out of the cells before being sent out for easier handling and planting. We modified our nursery delivery truck with stillages for the delivery and return of our specialist trays to and from planting projects.

To incentivise our clients to return our trays to us, we offer a deposit refund on all returned trays, effectively paying our clients to recycle! Upon the trays’ return, we use a pot-washing machine to sterilise the tray for reuse. Once a tray’s lifecycle is

complete, they are recycled into other plastic products. We have seen great success from our container deposit scheme, with customers coming back because they appreciate our approach.

As a society, we are coming to terms with the amount of plastic waste we create; how to responsibly deal with and even reduce it. The horticulture industry is similarly assessing its impact, with initiatives encouraging all nurseries to use Polypropylene as the standard pot material. We are passionate about educating the industry on the environmental benefits of using these moulded multi-plant trays over single-use plant pots, so that hopefully their use becomes commonplace. We encourage other nurseries in Victoria and beyond implement container deposit schemes to ensure that pots are reused in-house as many times as possible, and don’t end up in landfill.

We are privileged to work in an industry which values the environment and is devoted to plants. No doubt the horticulture industry is looking at the waste that we all produce, and inspired to do something about it, even if it starts out small!