What happens to the plastic plant pots you bring for recycling?

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You may have spotted or used our pot recycling points – there’s one in all of our branches where customers can leave their empty plastic plant pots and plastic plant trays.

These items may be surplus to requirement – perhaps the plants have been planted out so the pots are no longer needed, or they might be broken and can’t be reused.

At the moment you can’t put these plastic containers in your household plastic recycling – they must be taken to a household waste recycling centre. Or you can bring them to your nearest Otter Garden Centre when you come to do some shopping or visit one of our coffee shops.

Pot recycling

We’ve actually been collecting customers’ plastic pots for years.

We encourage other customers, gardening groups and schools to dip into the recycling points and take what they need. This is a great way to re-use the pots and we find that lots of people do this.

For a while we reused them ourselves in our growing nurseries – but sadly this isn’t possible now. Some customers use chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides, or the pots may be used for other purposes than plants – and we just can’t take the risk of contaminating our home-grown plants. We would have to completely sanitise them to reuse them – and we don’t currently have the capacity.

So we looked around at the other options available – and decided to team up with a local zero to landfill service, Devon Contract Waste (DCW). Any pots that aren’t taken for reuse or are broken are collected, including any of our own pots that we can’t use again.

The pots and trays go to DCW Polymers to be sorted before being processed into granules. This specialist plastics recycling and reprocessing plant is based in Exeter, allowing plastics to be recycled in-house by DCW. This in turn helps to reduce the need for virgin plastic products to be manufactured.

The plastic granules are sent to manufacturers here in the UK and overseas where they are used to make new products such as furniture, window frames, fencing, decking – and even dog agility equipment! So someone, somewhere, will be using a product made from your old plant pots and trays.

Please note, we will happily take any shape, colour of size of pot or tray. These must be plastic, not polystyrene or stone. We would appreciate it if you could rinse them out before you bring them to the pot recycling point.

Thank you for recycling!

Read our Sustainability Statement by clicking here.

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