An innovative recycling scheme for garden centres could improve collection of compost bags

A new UK recycling operation involving Veolia, garden product brand Miracle-Gro, and Dobbies Garden Centres is now set to tackle the growing problem of the 100 million bags used for compost, soil and chipped bark each year.

As a keen amateur gardener myself, I have often wondered – other than by planting trees and bee-friendly flowers in my own plot – what else I could be doing in order to improve my environmental impact. Such LDPE film packaging is not collected in the UK at the kerbside, and so the initiative has been placed on the customer and the private sector to take action.

Developed from successful trials, the Veolia-led process will collect and recycle the discarded bags into, for example, garden furniture, plastic films and new bags.

To effectively capture the material, Veolia's service has set up collection points across a selection of garden centre retailers with the aim of recycling an estimated 40 million bags. The dedicated wooden recycling boxes will enable gardeners to return their empty (and clean) LDPE bags which will be collected ready for processing.

Already hailed as a closed loop solution, nation-wide scale-up plans are in place.

Keith Leonard, Technical and Performance Director, Veolia UK and Ireland, said: "Our route to carbon net zero and the circular economy means we have to look at new and innovative solutions to capture materials and re-use them, rather than relying on finite virgin resources. By effectively capturing these bags we will be able to process them into new sustainable products that will help the nation's gardeners, and boost a green recovery."

The dedicated recycling bins are there for gardeners to deposit any brand, as Jane Hartley, Sustainability Marketing Manager from Miracle-Gro, explained: "We face a challenge that despite our best effort there is no recycling scheme in place for consumers to dispose of these single use compost bags.  Working with Dobbies and Veolia, I wanted to introduce an industry wide collection scheme where all manufacturers’ bags could be recycled.”

Consumer response has been very positive and the returned materials have thus far been of good quality. Other retailers have enquired about setting up similar schemes, according to Hartley.

Veolia has worked on numerous such projects to advance the collection and recycling of materials, helping global manufacturers to design packaging that can be more easily recycled. From a consumer point of view, it is comforting to now know what to do with empty gardening packaging without guilt or harm.