More than 50 volunteers have saved 2.4 tons of plastic flowerpots from area landfills during a one day drive. Most will be remade into future pots, although thousands will be re-used, says Michigan State University (MSU) Horticulturalist Art Cameron.
“We have a passion here to make gardening as green as we can make it,” says Cameron, the interim director of the MSU Horticulture Gardens. That means recycling whenever possible and avoiding landfills.
This year’s event represented a significant increase over the previous year’s effort which collected 1.5 tons of the pots.
“We have really stepped it up a notch. I believe this emphasizes that the program is catching on,” says Cameron.
Few of the volunteers were students. Rather they were from the Capital region’s community of plant people, spending most of May 30 sorting the pots and heaving those not taken by others into a semi-trailer.
The pots were hauled to Michigan Polymer Reclaim Inc., a St. Johns plastics recycler implementing a pilot project to learn about collecting, cleaning, grinding and marketing the rather dirty plastic from the horticulture industry, Cameron says.
Happily, groups like Habitat for Humanity and those working on preserving native plants took piles of pots away for reuse.
The largest category of plastic saved for the recycler was the black trays with the small insets for starter plants, aka polystyrene. It totaled 1,913 pounds. The second largest group was made up of the larger green and terra-cotta-colored plastic pots, referred to as polypropylene injections grade at 1,183 pounds.
Source: Art Cameron, MSU Horticulture Gardens
Gretchen Cochran, Innovation & Jobs editor, may be reached here.
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