Long Island nurseries, big-box stores offering to recycle their plastic pots

Summer means getting gardens in shape and buying plants to add color or greenery to the yard.

But it also means being left with all those plastic containers that the plants come in, which typically cannot be recycled through municipal programs.

Some Long Island nurseries and big-box stores are offering an eco-friendly solution. They are offering to recycle the containers, keeping them out of landfills and repurposing them for other uses.

At Hicks Nurseries Inc. in Westbury, the program collects plastic garden pots, cell packs, hanging baskets and trays. Customers are invited to drop off the pots at their pickup area to be taken out to a large recycling bin.

Anthony Core, general counsel for Jamaica Ash and Rubbish Removal, a waste management company in Westbury that works with Hicks, said the plastic containers they pick up from Hicks are melted down and processed into smaller plastic containers before returning to circulation and sold at stores.

Through this program, which began in 2009, Hicks has kept more than 68,000 cubic feet of plastic garden waste out of landfills, said Karen Musgrave, marketing and e-commerce associate for Hicks.

“I think it’s great because otherwise they go in the garbage and they burn it,” said Craig Hohorst, a Bellmore resident and regular Hicks customer. “If you can recycle it and you can make more pots and stuff out of it, I think that’s a great idea.”

Hicks Nurseries program

Hicks, one of Long Island’s largest gardening centers, runs the program annually from May 12 to July 17.

Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, an advocacy group based at Bennington College in Vermont and former EPA Regional Administrator during the Obama administration, has been working on passing laws to eliminate plastic pollution in the country.

The 16,000 different chemical combinations found in plastics make it hard for them to be demolished easily, according to Enck. Long Island’s largest landfill is in Brookhaven Town, where most of the waste it receives is plastic. 

In Albany, the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act, which the state Senate passed, was blocked in the Assembly on the last day of the legislation session. It would require New York companies with more than $5 million in net income to reduce their use of plastic packaging by 30% over 12 years, Newsday reported. 

Enck said the bill was supported by The City of New York, associations in counties and the Conference of Mayors. She plans to start all over again in January to try to get it through.

And if the bill does go “through both Houses and the governor signs it, you’re going to see a significant reduction in single-use of packaging, and the packaging will be safer for consumers because it’ll have fewer toxic chemicals in it,” she said.

Business groups, including the National Supermarket Association, opposed the bill stating it could increase consumer costs by up to $1 billion.

“The important thing with recycling is to make it as easy as possible,” said Enck. “That’s why there is a state law that mandates current [curb]side pickup of recyclables, but if nonprofits and other civic organizations want to boost that with other convenient ways to recycle [like the Hicks initiative], the more the better."

Home Depot and Lowe’s

Companies such as The Home Depot and Lowe’s also offer recycling programs.

The Home Depot encourages customers to bring packaging such as plant containers to be recycled. Since 2009, they’ve partnered with Michigan-based East Jordan Plastics, one of the largest horticultural container recycling companies in the country, to collect reusable plastic pots from garden centers.

“I think it’s a good program because we don’t need plastics going into the ground, going into the ocean,” said Michael Boltire, Merrick resident and regular Hicks customer. “They need to be recycled.”