Over the last forty years the number of plastic products available to the consumer has increased remarkably. Most of us will have noted that our gardening products are carefully wrapped in plastic packaging too. There is good reason why they have become popular, plastics are one of the most versatile products known to man with almost endless applications. They are strong, lightweight and since many products can be stacked within each other, are easy to transport and take up very little space on store shelves. They are the poster boy product of the just-in-time nature in which retailers operate and the free-next-day-delivery way in which many of us lead out lives. Why wait until next week to sow my seeds when I can do it tomorrow? We all have busy lives to plan and lead.
But recently there has been an acknowledgement about the environmental impact of plastics, and particularly about the black and coloured plastics that are used in our garden products. During 2018, BBC Gardeners' World began raising awareness of the problem, and have dedicated segments during the television program as well as features in their magazine to discuss the industrial scale of horticultural plastic production and the pitiful nature of recycling that shows no signs of ever improving.
I really recommend that you read this article from the Gardeners' World website about Gardening with less plastic.
With half a billion plant pots being sold and incinerated every year in the UK, as gardeners it is our personal responsibility to look towards options that minimise the environmental impact and move towards products that can be sustained for many many years.
We can all re-use plastics ourselves, and indeed people such as Monty Don and Charles Dowding are doing just that. There is a limit, however, to how many times thin plastics can be reused, as inevitably they will suffer damage from prolonged exposure to extremes of sunlight and temperature. Such plastics will begin to crack, and just like those plant pots mentioned on my "about us" page, they will become brittle and disintegrate.
Charles Dowding, through his excellent No Dig website and youtube videos also discusses how we can help. He reuses many trays as far as possible but has said on several occasions that some of his polystyrene plug trays are decades old and some have been reused up to 100 times! For me this is truly a sustainable product and unlike coloured plastics, it can be readily recycled.
The University of Exeter has published this page about the Impacts of plastics on marine life
They have joined forces with the Rozialia Project, and are working hard to highlight that damage that is being done by micro plastics, those pieces of plastic under 5mm in size, on the marine environment. I recommend that you follow these links if you would like to learn more on this subject.
The problem for many land locked gardeners is that the sea can seem such a long way away. Perhaps something to help bring the problem closer to home can be found from a report in the Independent newspaper of evidence of micro plastics being in fertilisers.
Our own food chain is being threatened by the product we have become dependant on, and it could be argued that we are choking by our own hands.
It may seem contradictory to many that one should deride the use of plastics whilst at the same time marketing polystyrene products. However, there are many virtues of polystyrene to be extolled and you can read about them here.