Earth Day 2013

Monday, April 22 is the day set aside this year as Earth Day. Its purpose is to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's natural environment. If you are a gardener you probably have a fairly high appreciation of this and may already be doing many things in your daily life to help protect the environment. However you might also need help when it comes to one byproduct of your gardening efforts. What to do with all of those pots that your cherished plants come in since many if not most curbside recycling programs do not take them?

I ran across some useful tips when reading a newsletter from Gardener’s Supply Company that linked to the full article on their blog. It will be especially useful if you live near the St. Louis, Missouri area and want to recycle your empty pots. The blog post also includes tips for how to reuse many types of pots that you may have lying around your garden shed or garage.

While I didn’t find a comprehensive list of places currently recycling planting pots to link you to, I did find that googling “planting pot recycling (plus your state)” returned several leads that you can use to track down recycling programs for planting pots in your area. So don’t despair, you can still head out to your local nursery and pick out some plants to add to your landscape this weekend in a mini celebration of Earth Day and not feel guilty about the potential negative impact of your empty planting pots if you follow these tips to find alternative uses for or recycle them.