2/15/2010
A Chicken in Every Pot? Not Exactly
John Friel
We’ve all had a déjà-vu experience, when a new situation feels eerily familiar. And then there’s vu-déjà, the tongue-in-cheek flipside, when you know you’ve never, ever been here before.
I had some of each at recent trade shows, working the booth of my new employer, Emerald Coast Growers. Friends who knew I’d switched delivered hugs and handshakes. Others asked, “Where’s your booth?” I literally had to wave my badge in some incredulous faces. It was fun.
Trade shows, with or without seminars, are always educational. At the Garden Writers luncheon, I learned about an odd, encouraging new development begging for a subtitle from yesteryear: A chicken in every pot.
Herbert Hoover never actually uttered that phrase while campaigning for the Presidency just before the Great Depression. But as we row out of whatever you call today’s economic doldrums, the Horticultural Research Institute is putting a chicken, or parts thereof, in some very special pots.
These aren’t cooking pots, they’re flowerpots—but don’t look for an order of extra crispy wings and drums lurking in your next poly gallon order. No, they’re talking about making the pots themselves from a problematic waste product—feathers.
HRI, the research affiliate of ANLA, has teamed with USDA to patent a process for extracting keratin, a biodegradable resin, from the billions of chicken and turkey feathers generated by American poultry producers. USDA says Frank Perdue et. al. produce a million tons of feathers each year. A shocking number. But so is this one: In the same 12-month period, says EPA, nurseries and greenhouses landfill almost 29 millions of tons of non-biodegradable plastic.
We call ourselves the green industry, for good and valid reasons. But by many measures, we’re just another petrochemically dependent industry. Trays, liners, pots, film, benching, plumbing, labels—everywhere you look there’s plastic. Steve Hutton of Conard-Pyle commented, “We don’t grow in soil, we grow in oil.”
It wouldn’t be so bad if more of our castoffs were being recycled. We’re not doing such a great job at that, but some of us are trying.
At last summer’s national symposium of the Perennial Plant Association in St. Louis, Dr. Steven Cline showed off the recycling program he runs at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Kemper Center for Home Gardening. His staff and volunteers collect and sort hort plastic products, grind them, and get them melted down and recast as plastic lumber, e.g., landscape timbers which MoBot says will last 40 to 50 years.
MoBot calls their initiative “the most extensive public garden recycling program in the nation.” In 2009, it collected a record 130,000 pounds of plastic. Since its inception, it’s kept 800,000 pounds, or 400 tons, of plastic out of landfills.
That’s encouraging and commendable. Kudos to Dr. Cline and crew. But compare their numbers to what we’re all shipping out in a year: 29 million tons sent to the landfills vs. 65 tons diverted by the most extensive program going. If those were your goalie’s stats, your hockey team would be seeking a new goalie, stat.
Of course, this isn’t the whole story. There are many other programs, run by extension agents and the Master Gardeners. Companies like Midwest Groundcovers are doing admirable work, reducing our landfill footprint.
Homeowners reuse pots and trays, as do some growers, though most are reluctant to do so because of disease issues. But the numbers suggest we’re still just taking a few margaritas’ worth of shavings off a very large iceberg.
Can chickens come to the rescue? No, but they can help. Keratin can be molded into biodegradable plastic products, especially pots. Combined with plastic resins like PVC, it becomes more stable and durable, but still breaks down eventually. That’s great for pots, useless for stuff we want to last, e.g., the aforementioned benches, roofs and pipes.
The henhouse is coming to the greenhouse: As I type, a trial run of 1-gal. poultry pots is set for real-world testing by nurseries and the USDA. Chickens reincarnated to contain carnations (or hens and chicks) aren’t going to put MoBot out of the recycling business; would that they could. But it’s a start.
GP
John Friel is marketing director for Emerald Coast Growers and a freelance writer.