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The horticulture industry has traditionally relied heavily on plastics, particularly for pots, trays and growing containers. What are the biggest sustainability challenges facing the sector today, and where do you see the greatest opportunities for meaningful change?
Horticultural containers present a unique recycling challenge because they are often dirty, brightly coloured, and disposed of in suburban and rural areas where sophisticated recycling collection and processing infrastructure may not be available. Many municipalities currently ask residents not to place horticultural containers in their kerbside recycling bins, although retailers like The Home Depot have worked to address this with return and collection bins in their garden centres.
We have not yet seen sufficient data on recovery and recycling rates specific to our horticultural containers to know with confidence what those rates are, but there is opportunity for our industry to work together to standardize on more recycling-friendly designs and colours, and increase the use of post-consumer recycled (PCR) content and recyclable materials.
Consumer education also plays an important role. Improving awareness on the importance of rinsing, sorting, and proper disposal can help increase the likelihood that these products are successfully recovered and recycled.
At the same time, our industry is facing increasing regulatory pressure, particularly from Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) requirements, while growers are looking for practical solutions that don't add unnecessary cost or complexity to their businesses. That creates an opportunity to rethink not only how we manage horticultural containers at end-of-life, but also how we design them and what materials we use in the first place.
That's why we believe the path forward requires a combination of better recycling and recovery systems, greater use of recycled materials, continued education across the supply chain, and investment in innovative alternatives to conventional plastics. Those are the areas where we see the greatest opportunity for meaningful change.
Horticulture has to balance sustainability ambitions with cost, performance and complex supply-chain requirements. What do you think the broader packaging industry can learn from the way horticulture is approaching these challenges?
At Growscape, sustainability has become embedded throughout our organization and is connected to business strategy, operations, product development, and customer needs. It isn’t something that only the sustainability team worries about or manages. It is a part of how we think about our business and the value we deliver to our customers.
We believe business can and should be an agent for addressing sustainability challenges while also using sustainability as a source of value generation, differentiation and growth. That means looking for opportunities where doing the right thing environmentally can also create better outcomes for our customers and our business.
Our shorthand for this is “we are doing well by doing good.” And we are seeing impressive business results from this approach. I think that’s the larger takeaway for the packaging industry: sustainability is most effective when it becomes part of the value proposition rather than a separate initiative managed by one department.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is becoming an increasingly important consideration for businesses. How can companies move beyond viewing EPR simply as a compliance exercise and use it as an opportunity to rethink material choice, product design and end-of-life?
One of the challenges in our industry is that most of our grower customers are smaller, family-owned businesses that don’t have dedicated resources focused on EPR compliance or sustainable packaging. Right now, our industry is starting to wake up and learn what EPR means and how significantly it can affect packaging design, material selection, and ultimately the bottom line.
We view our role as sustainability leaders to engage with them at every opportunity and share our expertise and insights. We spend considerable time helping growers understand how to register with producer responsibility organizations (PROs), comply with evolving requirements, and evaluate material alternatives that may reduce their exposure to EPR fees.
But education is only part of the equation. We are also actively investing in innovative non-plastic alternatives that could reduce the amount of packaging subject to traditional waste-management systems, including our ReTerra plantable pot technology. If a container can perform its function and then biodegrade in soil rather than entering a traditional packaging waste stream, it has the potential to drastically reduce customer EPR fees.
Cost remains one of the biggest considerations when introducing more sustainable materials. How does Growscape balance environmental impact with the commercial and operational realities faced by growers, retailers and other customers?
I think it’s something of a myth that sustainable products have to cost more or represent a trade-off with operational efficiency. We want to bust those myths and show that sustainable innovations don’t have to net to a loss of some kind.
One lesson the environmental movement has taught us over the last 50 years is that it’s generally cheaper and more efficient to prevent waste than to mitigate or manage it after the fact. One of the consequences of EPR is that it is a great accelerator or equalizer in costs for sustainable innovation that most companies haven’t realized yet.
As EPR fee structures increasingly reward attributes like high PCR content or biobased and degradable materials, we use those as constructive constraints for innovation. These constraints have inspired projects like our ReSource take-back recycling program and our ReTerra plantable pot technology.
The commercial reality is that building our own horticultural container recycling program is ultimately more cost-effective than buying kerbside-collected and processed recycled materials. Beyond that, plantable horticultural containers exhibit the highest level of efficiency as they degrade into the soil and leave no packaging waste to manage.
Our challenge is making these value opportunities visible across the supply chain so that everyone understands their role in creating more sustainable systems.
There are many promising alternatives to conventional plastics, but developing a sustainable material and successfully implementing it at scale are very different challenges. What needs to happen for alternative materials to become genuinely commercially viable?
Commercial viability requires more than developing a material that performs well in a laboratory. It has to perform in real-world applications, integrate into existing manufacturing systems, meet customer requirements and make economic sense at scale.
We are working with Kaimarra Advanced Materials to develop our ReTerra technology. Kaimarra is built on chemistry developed at the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry and uses a patented biodegradable polymer technology that allows us to adjust material properties, including the time a product degrades in soil, to specific use cases.
That flexibility is important. For example, a fast-growing annual crop may require a quicker-degrading formulation than a nursery container intended to support a woody plant for several years. The unique technology of chemically combining a biodegradable biopolymer with a biodegradable filler has the potential to offer a lower-cost alternative to some conventional bioplastics.
Just as important, the material is designed to perform like the conventional plastic it replaces and run on existing molding equipment at full production speed with no tooling changes. Those manufacturing considerations are critical to commercial adoption.
Collaborating across our industry through an open-innovation approach is key. Through our exclusive partnership with Kaimarra and our strong relationship with our customers, we’re able to conduct real-world trials and use those collective results to continue refining the material for specific applications. That open-innovation approach allows us to iterate with growers rather than trying to solve every challenge in isolation.
Sustainability challenges are too large for a single company to address alone. Significant progress will require more collaboration and fewer barriers to sharing expertise and innovation.
When assessing whether one material is more sustainable than another, how important is it to look beyond the material itself and consider manufacturing, transportation, product performance, recyclability and end-of-life together?
It is impossible to assess whether a material is more sustainable without considering the entire life cycle of the product. Life cycle thinking and life cycle assessment (LCA) are indispensable tools for making this determination.
We see the value of this approach in innovations like our Keystone pot and tray system. We designed this system to maximize the number of live plants that can be placed on a tray, retail shelf, and truck. This doesn’t result in a net reduction in plastic material itself but rather pays dividends downstream with customers drastically increasing their growing efficiency and decreasing the transportation impacts. We’re seeing 20% more plants on a shelf tray, and in turn, 20% more plants transported per truck. At scale, that can mean fewer deliveries and lower transportation impacts. For example, if a shipment that previously required 10 truckloads can be consolidated into eight, two truckloads and the associated freight emissions are eliminated.
Reducing impacts within the walls of the manufacturing and distribution operations is important, but some of the largest opportunities emerge when you look at your product’s entire life cycle and consider how design decisions affect the system downstream.
Growscape has made significant commitments around the use of recycled materials and reducing reliance on virgin resources. Where do post-consumer recycled materials fit into the future of horticultural packaging, and what challenges still need to be overcome to increase their use?
We’ve made these commitments because we practice anticipatory leadership and understand that learning to efficiently operate in a circular economy is vital to being a future-ready company. Recycled content claims were often viewed as marketing strategies a few years ago.
Today, they’re increasingly becoming regulatory requirements. States such as New Jersey have established minimum PCR-content requirements for certain rigid plastic containers, including horticultural pots and trays. So having sufficient PCR content and being able to demonstrate compliance through state registrations and certifications are now barriers to entry to the market.
At the same time, increasing geopolitical and supply-chain volatility has highlighted the risks associated with relying heavily on virgin materials. Increasing PCR content and developing more direct, reliable sources of recycled material can improve supply-chain resilience while reducing regulatory risk.
That’s one reason we launched the ReSource Recycling Program. Managing our own source of recycled material isn’t simply a marketing strategy. It is part of a broader strategy to lower our regulatory risk, improve resilience and efficiency, and increase long-term profitability in a future where business as usual simply isn’t going to work.
The challenge is maintaining the pace of change and understanding that the payoff may be realized over the mid-term instead of immediately, which requires companies to stay committed even when competitors are taking a more short-term approach.
As Ray Anderson famously said, “The status quo is a powerful opiate.” Once you understand where the industry needs to go, the challenge becomes continuing to move toward that future.
Sustainable alternatives still need to perform in demanding real-world environments. How do you ensure sustainability innovations deliver the durability, efficiency and performance customers expect without creating additional cost or operational challenges elsewhere in the supply chain?
That comes back to the importance of real-world testing and working directly with customers throughout the development process. With ReTerra, we’re conducting trials with growers to understand how the material performs under different growing conditions and crop cycles, allowing us to refine characteristics such as degradation timing while ensuring it meets the functional requirements growers expect from conventional containers.
We’re also evaluating how the material performs across manufacturing and supply chain. A sustainable alternative can’t create new inefficiencies elsewhere in the system. It needs to perform for the customer, integrate into existing manufacturing systems, and make operational and economic sense. That's why we view testing and collaboration as ongoing parts of the innovation process, not just steps toward commercialization.
How important is collaboration between manufacturers, growers, retailers, recyclers, policymakers and consumers in creating a truly circular system for horticultural plastics? Where do you think the biggest gaps currently exist?
Collaboration is essential because creating a more circular economic model requires packaging design, material choices, consumer awareness and behaviour, and recycling technology to work together at scale. The biggest gap today is often the lack of alignment and communication among all stakeholders.
The analogy I like to use is that of a football team. As the packaging manufacturer, I’m the quarterback. I can throw the perfect spiral pass (a package designed to be recycled) but I have to rely on others to catch it, run it down the field, and ultimately score that touchdown.
The growers and retailers play an important role in how products are handled and collected. Consumers influence what happens at end-of-life. Recyclers need the technology and infrastructure to recover the material. And it’s up to the policymakers to establish the rules of the game.
If any one of those pieces is missing, the system doesn't work as intended. Building a truly circular packaging system requires all of those stakeholders to communicate and work toward the same objective.
Looking ahead, what do you think will drive the biggest changes in sustainable packaging and materials over the next five years, regulation, customer expectations, economics, material innovation or something else? And what developments are you personally most excited about?
I think the rising concerns over microplastics and their potential impacts on human health could become an important inflection point in public awareness and drastically increase opposition to single-use plastics in the next five years. The science is still evolving, but the growing body of research showing potential human health impacts is prompting increased attention to the issue.
I expect that to broaden the conversation beyond the current focus on recycling plastic packaging and accelerate the development and commercialization of non-plastic alternatives. That’s why I am excited about the advances in biodegradable and biobased materials, including the technologies we’re developing with Kaimarra. EPR is also an important policy mechanism for accelerating these innovations, although many current regulations were developed around a world in which these alternative materials were not yet available at commercial scale.
As those technologies mature and enter the market, I expect policymakers will continue to evaluate how EPR frameworks should treat products that have fundamentally different end-of-life characteristics.
Ultimately, I think the biggest changes will come from the intersection of regulation, economics and material innovation. When those forces begin pointing in the same direction, sustainable alternatives have a much greater opportunity to move from promising technology to a commercially viable solution.