Above: Simon and Dan Dicker alongside their in-store pot recycling bin.

Ashortwalk, designers and manufacturers of award winning home and garden products made from recycled coffee cups, are launching their plant pot recycling scheme nationally after a successful pilot venture.

They aim to take the 5 million-plus redundant pots currently residing in garden sheds and green houses and turning them back into new useful products for the home and garden.

Plant pots are notoriously difficult to recycle, with most helping to fill Britain’s landfill sites or being incinerated. Ashortwalk’s solution is a closed loop recycling process. Consumers drop their pots off at their local garden centre or nursery, from where ashortwalk will collect them, melt them down into malleable pellets and re-purpose them as garden products.

“By turning old pots back into new products the ‘Pot to Product’ scheme offers people a rare chance to participate in a full, closed loop recycling process,” says company foundrer Dan Dicker, an ex Dyson designer. “Recycling is only truly complete once you re-use that same material. The very same plant pot you recycled at your local garden centre last month is now back in the same store as a bird feeder, an outdoor clock or even a house sign.”

This innovative scheme needs the gardeners of Britain to unite and help spread the word  - and local garden centres and nurseries to come on board.

The scheme is free and open to all garden centres and nurseries on mainland UK – but you have to become a stockist. As garden centres or nurseries joins the scheme, they offer the range of garden products right next to the collection bins – from patented plant hangers to unique ECO bird feeders geared towards using food waste that would otherwise end up in the bin.

The scheme is backed by RECOUP, the UK's leading authority on plastics waste management.

Go to www.ashortwalk.com or call 01872 575000 to find out more