Readers respond to Beth Botts' article "Push is on to green up the gardening industry" [July 13, 2008] about efforts to reduce the amount of plastic that is used in horticulture and not recycled (see chicagotribune.com/gardenplastic):* * *
Your article in Sunday's paper about recycling the plastic containers plants come in (or the inability to do so) brings up another recycling issue over which you might have some influence. Many mail-order plant companies use foam peanuts when they ship their plants. As you know, these cannot be recycled, only reused.
But to be able to bring these peanuts to a shipping store ( FedEx, UPS, etc.) to be reused, they must be clean. This necessitates sorting the peanuts and then tossing the dirty ones.
Some companies now use cornstarch peanuts which can be added to the compost pile or just thrown outside where they will deteriorate and not cause environmental damage.
I've taken to writing plant companies that use foam peanuts to ask them to use the cornstarch variety. If other gardeners were to do the same, perhaps we could make another little difference for our world.
-- Debbie Pastors, Oak Park
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Loved your piece in Sunday's Trib. I have plant containers that are at least 10 years old! I constantly propagate new plants and give them to friends with one caveat: Return the trays and containers. I just traded two trays of pachysandra for a massage from my massage therapist neighbor!
Reusing them is the only answer until they come up with biodegradable or recyclable ones.
-- Susan Ross, Union Pier, Mich.
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Thanks for that great article on unrecycled plastic in the green industry. MELA (Midwest Ecological Landscaping Association) keeps saying -- and hearing -- that we need to do something about it. I hope your article will spur us and others to act.
-- Rinda West, Rinda West Landscape Designs, Chicago
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Good article, I found it very informative. What I would like to know is who buys the shredded plastic materials? Is it reused to make new plastic pots or must it be morphed into something else?
-- Dan Schwartz, Barrington
Beth Botts replies: The Missouri Botanic Garden uses the pots it collects to make landscape timbers. There is a market for used plastic, and many pots, trays and cell packs could be recycled into new containers -- if enough clean ones were collected and sorted by the kind of plastic they are made from. But that has yet to happen on a large scale. Some of the content of pots and other containers now is recycled, but the vast majority of it was melted down from other types of containers and waste, not from used garden plastic.Copyright © 2015, Chicago Tribune