PRODUCTION NEWS
Let the past colour the future By Matt Ross On 22nd October, the Tree & Shrub Growers held an online meeting to discuss Recycled Colour™, an exciting new product development by Garden City Plastics, that will help close the loop on recycling of Polypropylene. Attendees had the opportunity to hear from Matthew Mills, National Sales and Marketing Manager at Garden City Plastics. The session was expertly hosted by Heath McKenzie of Australian Growing Solutions. Whilst plants may be the hero of our industry, the pot it inhabits is pivotal. Garden City Plastics (GCP), Australia’s largest supplier of pots and containers for wholesale nurseries, landscape and gardening industries, have developed a process whereby they can fulfill any customer order using recycled materials. GCP have just launched their Recycled Colour™ range. Having previously worked with virgin materials to supply customers with coloured pots, Recycled Colour™ uses 100 per cent recycled materials collected from Australian homes. This is a big step towards closing the loop on the recycling of Polypropylene. With the quality of curb side collected recyclables increasing, due to the public being more educated around sorting waste and more engaged with sustainability practices, the time is right for Recycled Colour™. The onus now is on the industry to support this fantastic initiative and opt for recycled pots. And why wouldn’t customers opt for recycled pots rather than virgin pots?
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GROUNDSWELL JANUARY 2021
Matthew explains that they expect some customers to resist the transition because many of us are creatures of habit, “there’s a perception that it’s easier to do things as we’ve always done them, in this example, to continue to order virgin plant pots.” The other perceived drawback is that not every colour in the spectrum is available, due to the predominance of blue in collected household recyclables the Recycled Colour™ range offers darker shades of ten colours. This logic is purely superficial and is dwarfed by the environment benefits it delivers. In fact, the darker coloured pots perform better because there is virtually zero light penetration and the roots grow in the dark as they should, this is not the case with the virgin coloured pots. And it turns out that our industry are already a leader in recycling and sustainability practices, and have been for decades. In 2019, GCP recycled 10million kgs of PP5 in their Melbourne factory alone. That’s an awful lot of plant pots for our industry and an incredible amount of plastic diverted from
