Years ago, I was watching a feel‑good segment on the local news about a garden centre that had launched a recycling scheme for their used plastic plant pots. Customers were encouraged to bring back the empties once they’d transplanted their new purchases into the garden. A wholesome little initiative, I thought.
My warm glow lasted about thirty seconds.
In my head, those pots were being returned to the supplier, washed, de‑labelled, and stacked up ready for another round of seedlings. A simple loop. A sensible loop.
But the report cut to a conveyor belt feeding perfectly good pots into a machine that crushed them into plastic pellets. The can be used to make fleece jackets!
That was the moment I realised the clue had been there all along. They never said the pots would be reused, but recycled. I’d filled in the rest with wishful thinking.
Some of the pots on that conveyor were pristine. I can understand melting down the broken ones, but a pot that’s held a plant for all of three weeks surely has a few more seasons left in it. Instead, it was being sacrificed to the great fleece‑jacket economy.
Loop the Loop!
When I was a child in the 70s and 80s, drinks came in glass bottles with a deposit. You paid a little extra, returned the empties, and got the deposit back. The bottles went back to the plant, were washed, and went straight back into circulation. No shredding. No melting. No existential questions about the global fleece surplus.
There are plans to revive that deposit‑and‑return system today and I genuinely hope they succeed. I just can’t shake the suspicion that somewhere, in a boardroom, someone is pitching the exciting potential of turning all those bottles into yet more fleece jackets.
Credits
📸 “Norfolk” by me.
🀄 Thanks to Heather and Hilde for their feedback.