Whilst 2018 saw a widespread move across the industry towards carbon pigment free pots, Porters Fuchsias’ Happy Plants brand have taken their recycling efforts one step further, with the addition of a recycling print to their 2019 Poppelmann Blue pots.
Almost 3 million such printed pots will leave Porters’ nursery this year, covering almost every product across their seasonal pot bedding ranges.
Porters were the first UK grower to introduce carbon pigment-free pots, having picked up on the format at last year’s IPM Essen trade show. From first seeing the pot last January, they quickly diverted over half a million 13cm pots from their summer production to the Poppelmann Blue pot, with the first stock hitting garden centres in early April 2018.
They combined the pot with Modiform’s moulded fibre EcoExpert tray, meaning that all delivered packaging from their 13cm range could be recycled at kerbside.
From this point, they have reconfigured almost all of their 2019 single-use plastics to be compatible with kerbside recycling; with PET bedding packs and jumbo carry packs soon to be released, as well as further expansions on their use of both PET and moulded fibre trays.
More than 70,000 of the new printed pots have already reached garden centres nationwide in the form of a 9cm primrose crop.
Reaction to the printed pots, designed in collaboration with Poppelmann, has already been extremely positive, with high hopes that the print will help customers to more easily identify the pot’s recyclability. In turn, it is hoped this will mean pots are more likely to be recycled – whilst most garden centres are now well briefed on the credentials of using a ‘non-black’ pot, general consensus is that this message has not yet widely been taken board by the consumer from a non-printed pot.
Printing on the pots also allows Porters to incorporate a barcode, meaning they can restrict the use of additional stickers wherever possible; there is a very real concern that residual stickers can inhibit the recyclability of the pots.
Avoiding the additional costs of printing and applying so many stickers has also helped Porters to mitigate the additional cost implications of using the carbon pigment free pot.
