Drowning in plastics

I’m increasingly horrified at how much plastic packaging I bring home. As we learn more about how plastic pervades our environment, I’m thinking I need to do more to reduce my plastic use, but how? It’s hard to imagine buying food without plastic bags, wraps, trays, and containers. In the garden, too, I accumulate an increasing collection of plastic pots and other equipment.

Reusing plastic boxes that held salad greens as mini-greenhouses

    Some recent news stories about plastic are really scary and discouraging. We’ve been hearing for years about floating islands of plastic in the ocean with fish, seabirds, and other creatures taking in plastic waste from the water.

Albatross chick with a belly full of plastic-photo NOAA

This year I was alarmed to learn that the air and soil too are polluted with microplastics—bits smaller than 5 millimeters, most microscopic. Of the increasing mass of plastics we humans are manufacturing—currently more than 300 million tons per year—only nine percent is recycled. The rest breaks down into smaller and smaller bits. These tiny pieces of plastic fall from the sky with rain and snow, and not just in populated areas. A recent study of the Arctic found surprisingly high microplastic concentrations there too, with more released as polar ice melts.
 

Arctic Sea ice in 2011-photo NASA

    Scientists estimate that we’re ingesting tens of thousands of microplastic particles in our food and water every year. Health effects aren’t known yet, but it’s thought that lifelong plastic ingestion can harm the immune system. If you drink your water from plastic bottles, you’re taking in four times more plastic than if you drink tap water. At least that’s easily correctable. Other animals don’t have any way to avoid the plastic we’ve so liberally sprinkled throughout their environment, so they’ll ultimately suffer more.

Water with a side of microplastics

    I don’t know exactly how I’ll kick my plastic habit in the garden, but I’m making it a goal. If you’ve found solutions, I’d love to hear about them. I just watched a helpful video from The Old Farmer’s Almanac about alternatives to plastic in the garden. Some suggestions: wooden seed trays; seedling pots made from natural fiber or recycled paper; trees, shrubs and perennials bought bareroot instead of in plastic pots; homemade soil amendments and potting mix to replace bagged products; and metal or wooden plant supports instead of plastic netting.

Tomato seedlings in newspaper pots

    Many of these measures would involve a loss of convenience. Plastic pots and trays are light and easy to wash and store. Large ceramic containers for summer plantings are prettier but much more cumbersome and expensive than their plastic counterparts. Avoiding plastic pots at the garden center will severely limit plant shopping options. It feels like time to start turning away from plastic, though. If I could buy and use 10 percent less next year, at least that would be a start.

Can I garden with less of this stuff?

    Much of my garden equipment is plastic: wheelbarrow, large pots, barrels. I should use this equipment for as long as possible to amortize the embedded carbon, but I think I’ll stop planting vegetables in those plastic pots. I’d just as soon avoid adding microplastics to our homegrown tomatoes.

What does sustainable mean?

Happy New Year! For 2017’s first post, I’m going back to basics to clarify what I mean by sustainable gardening. 

Composting is key, but there's more

The term “sustainable” gets such broad use these days that it’s losing meaning.

     For example, did you know that Poland Spring water is “sustainably sourced from local Maine springs?” That’s what it says on the bottle. There’s a lot the label doesn’t say.

     It doesn’t say that Poland Spring has been owned for a number of years by the Nestle Corporation, an international bad actor that came to attention in the 1970s for causing infant deaths in the Third World by marketing infant formula to mothers who didn’t have access to safe drinking water. The babies could have lived safely with breastfeeding. 

    The label doesn’t address the impact of the the huge Poland Spring operation on Maine towns where Nestle extracts 800 million gallons annually from aquifers and ships it out on a fleet of heavy trucks. 

                          2013 Press Herald File Photo/John Patriquin

    Perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t say that plastic water bottles are some of the most environmentally problematic products we use. 

     Riverkeeper, an environmental watchdog for the Hudson, offers some eye-opening statistics about bottled water. The one that really got to me was this: “The energy it takes to transport the water to market, to chill the bottles, and collect the empties is the energy equivalent of filling each bottle a quarter of the way with oil.”  

There's no "away" for plastic water bottles

Whatever Poland Spring means by “sustainable,” it’s not what I mean. 

    Getting back to the garden, my definition of sustainable gardening is that it:
•    imitates natural processes
•    emphasizes cycling of materials
•    minimizes waste and energy use
That’s easy to say, but real gardening choices depend on weighing very local considerations.

    Say I’m choosing garden structures such as the tuteurs I bought last summer from Terra Trellis (my talented sister-in-law Jennifer Gilbert Asher is the designer and proprietor).  

I upgraded to an elegant steel tuteur like this one

The wooden structures I’d been using for vines such as cucumbers held out for a while, but as untreated wood will, they eventually began to rot and fall apart. 

The wooden trellis didn't last

The new ones are made of powder-coated steel.  That means they’ll last for the rest of my gardening life. But it also means that more energy went into their manufacture.

     Would it have been more sustainable to buy wooden ones every few years? That would depend on such factors as where the wood comes from, how it’s harvested, and what processes are involved in building the metal and wooden structures, all unknowns to me. 

     Perhaps most sustainable of all would be to build trellises from local scrap wood or straight branches pruned off my trees. That would tax another finite resource, my time and energy.

     I don’t think there’s a single correct choice. In each situation, we have to weigh our priorities and find the best solution for our time, place, resources, and stage of life. If we do our best to make informed choices, I believe we’ll gradually progress toward more sustainable practices.