Botanic: responsible gardening - recovering and recycling garden pots

Challenge

The garden centre brand Botanic, a family business from Haute Savoie, in France, offers a range of more than 1,000 eco-friendly gardening products in its 70 shops. Committed to natural gardens, the company has been promoting its eco-responsibility values since 1995.

Botanic wanted to further reduce the presence of plastic. However, the advantages of this material are so numerous that it is difficult to do without it in a nursery, however ecologically responsible it may be.

In addition to biodegradable containers, Botanic has chosen to explore the use of recycled plastic which, comparatively - and against all expectations - has an interesting environmental record. All that remained was to devise a circular economy loop which, by recovering used pots from customers, would make it possible to manufacture new ones...

Veolia's solution

The collaboration with Veolia and ANVI Plasturgie started in 2019 and it took less than a year to develop the first recycling channel for garden pots. This virtuous cycle is based on ultra-simplified collection procedures for used pots in shops. Thus the new "citizen pots", marketed in 2021, contain recycled polypropylene from the Botanic collection chain.

In the 70 Botanic shops, the approach has been welcomed by the teams: damaged plants that cannot be sold are carefully sorted and separated from their PP pots to feed the new plastic pot industry.

Specific Benefits

• Close Loop
  Cradle to cradle system that directly transform waste into the same product, and this for several life cycles.
   
• Offset Plastic Waste