Plastic Progress

Mike Nowak

The metaphor isn’t perfect, but imagine if the ocean liner Queen Mary were made only of plastic, and it was called Green Industry instead of Queen Mary and you were trying to turn it around. Apparently, something like that is happening in the horticultural world right now. It’s a slow change, to be sure, but it’s measurable and perhaps inexorable.

Business after business–whether landscape contractor or garden center or grower or distributor–has become aware that the industry must learn how to deal with the overwhelming amount and variety of plastics that have become the norm in the trade. And by “deal with,” I’m talking about the mantra of the environmental movement: reduce, reuse, recycle.

Four MELA members who have begun to address this problem are Midwest Groundcovers in St. Charles; Luurtsema Sales, Inc. in Jenison, Michigan; Charles J. Fiore Nursery in Praire View and Chicago; and Lurvey Landscape Supply and Garden
Center in Des Plaines.

Midwest Groundcovers began its Horticultural Container Recycling Program last year, the first such effort in Illinois. They note on their website that 350,000,000 pounds of plastic are sent to landfills annually. They accept #2 High density polyethylene (HDPE) nursery pots, #5 Polypropylene (PP) nursery trays or flats, and #6 Polystyrene (PS) pots, trays, and flats from customers to whom they supply plants, as long as the containers are sorted and relatively clean. Vice-President Christa Orum-Keller says that, two years into the mission, “I guess I’m a little bit disappointed that we haven’t been recycling more.” Lisa Fiore, President of C.J. Fiore, says that they, too, began recycling in the past couple of years. In the beginning, they took their plastics to a local recycling center. But they teamed with Midwest Groundcovers, in part to support an industry partner. She acknowledges that the response to their program was “a little mixed” in their first year, but improved in year two. “We use a lot of plastic in this industry,” Fiore confides. She suggests that there might be a shift back to balled-and-burlapped plants as a response to the cost of using plastic in a depressed economy.

Lurvey is just getting into the recycling game, according to Operations Manager Jean Bragdon. While they have already been accepting plastics from their
landscaping clients, they are now reaching out to their retail customers. To this point, she estimates that only five to ten percent of retail customers show up with pots to recycle. And when the garden center does collect plastic, Bragdon says that the labor in separating materials and the space to store them until they can be picked up–especially in the off season--are major concerns.

Rob Arnold, Vice-President of Marketing with Luurtsema claims that after just three years they are close to breaking even with their recycling program. They’ll take pretty much any plastic back, though they don’t reuse pots–they send them to nearby East Jordan Plastics, Inc. for recycling. They do, however, clean and re-sell trays to growers at a discounted price. In 2008, Luurtsema began accepting recycled pots at Chicagoland Jewel food store parking lot tents, to which they also supplied garden plants. Arnold says that in the first year, it was practically word-of-mouth among customers. But by June of 2010, they had already surpassed levels for the entire 2009 year. While “doing the right thing” is part of it, Arnold sees it as a smart business move. “Costs are covered. It helps the environment. It’s the service customers are looking for.”

Mike Nowak is the co-founder of MELA and the Past President of the Board of Directors. You can hear him talk about gardening on WCPT radio on Sunday morning on the Mike Nowak Show.

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