Plant pots

I had a look in co-op today to see if they had any of those flower buckets that my dad uses as large plant pots. No luck. But on the way back I dropped into the local plant nursery to find the chap there throwing just what I needed into the skip ! Ten good strong 15L plastic planters, and he let me take them for free - he seemed pleased they would get reused. Bargain ! Well worth asking.

Our local garden centre has a large container in its car park for unwanted flower pots - anyone can leave them and they are free for people who want to take them. I sometimes have a rummage through, though not usually anything big in there.

This is not really a garden centre as such; they produce some of their own stock and buy some in, do a market stall or two and presumably offer some kind of landscape services.

Talking with the guy yesterday he was saying they have tried to find a way to recycle the plastic pots and trays, but the suppliers don't want them back and they can't find anyone who recycles them. So they end up in the skip. It seems that plastic remains just too cheap.

Our local council recycles that lightweight scrunchy plastic that fruit punnets etc are made from, and they also have a large skip at the main tip for rigid plastics. I would have thought that plastic pots and trays would fit into one of those categories, which suggests that they can be recycled. Perhaps there is just nothing local enough to be a viable proposition.

I think it varies hugely from Council to Council what can be recycled - probably depends on what particular contracts they have to move stuff on.  Actually, the whole Council recycling thing can be incredibly wasteful in terms of resources used to collect and dispose of the stuff, but all that seems to matter is that they can tick the government recycling target box.  I don't know if it still does, but a few years ago our recycled cardboard was shipped out to Poland and I know that there are now 4 bin lorries doing the rounds for every one that used to collect previously.
With the clean burning technology now available I'm sure it would be far less costly both in financial and environmental terms to incinerate waste close to source and produce power for the grid at the same time.

Think you're probably right there, Ploshkin. There does, in my opinion, seem to be far too much emphasis on recycling. If a product or its materials are seen to be recyclable (in theory at least) it seems to give carte blanche for ever increasing consumerism.

It comes at the end of the trio: reduce, reuse, recycle.

I also got a stack of small flowerpots a few years ago from a local nursery, because they hadn't got time to wash them out! It seems to be well worth asking.