Wyevale Nurseries is now using recyclable plant pots for all future retail plants that it’s currently potting.

The company has started to phase out its black plastic pots replacing them with taupe coloured pots, supplied by Aeroplas in the West Midlands, in a bid to fight the war on plastic. 

Steve Reed, Production Director of the Container Division at Wyevale Nurseries in Hereford, explained: “We’re pleased to announce that we’re now starting to pot up our retail plants into recyclable taupe plant pots starting with our Astilbes. These pots can then be recycled kerbside by consumers.

“We plan to produce plants in more than 700,000 of the new recyclable pots this year. There will be a big overlap for customers as everything we have potted in 2018 is in black pots but by the autumn most of our stock will be supplied in taupe pots to retailers.

“It’s fantastic that the general public can recycle the taupe pots kerbside with other household waste, which has not been possible before. The black pots would previously end up in landfill because they contain carbon black pigment. The new taupe pots are carbon black pigment free polypropylene, which can be identified by near infrared (NIR) analysis and therefore can be recycled through kerbside collections.

“The recyclable taupe pot is an industry initiative being led by representatives from the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) and UK growers. It’s great to see many growers’ backing the taupe pot.

“We are also ISO 14001 certificated, this is an international standard for environmental management, and switching to taupe pots is one of our key targets for the year, to reduce our impact on the environment. We’re very keen to look at the other ways we use plastic within the company to furthermore improve our environmental credentials.”

Currently Wyevale Nurseries uses plant labels from Floramedia and these are all recyclable via the kerbside collection.

The product selection available from Wyevale Nurseries is envied across the industry and the talented team regularly introduces new, award-winning plant varieties.

Its main business is to supply garden centres, landscape contractors, local authorities, foresters and landowners with a comprehensive array of trees, shrubs, hedging, herbaceous and specimen plants.