Login

USERNAME
PASSWORD

Become a Registered Guest Login Help Lost Password?

My wife and I have been in this industry since the early 1980s and have owned and operated a design/build business for 13 years. Like many entrepreneurs our age, we have survived a couple of energy crunches and experienced an environmental renaissance that raised the awareness of what it means to do business in an environmentally friendly way. Over the years, we have been trained by experience and necessity to reduce our fuel consumption, and we design and build with both Mother Nature and the customer in mind.

Are we doing enough, though? That is a question we recently asked ourselves thanks in large part to the ongoing crisis in the Middle East and a spiraling energy crisis here at home. As a country, we need to do everything we can to free ourselves from our dependency on Middle East oil and simultaneously find ways to reduce our consumption of not just fuel, but all petroleum-based products.

The three R’s of recycling

Reduce, Recycle, and Reuse — the three R’s of recycling — apply to petroleum as well as lawn debris. Of course, fuel is still a major concern, and we do what we can to keep our costs from getting out of hand. In fact, fuel costs are already up 30 percent over last year. As a three-truck company, that translates into a couple of thousand dollars more than what we had spent last year at this time. I can only imagine what bigger companies are spending. As a result, we have revisited, and continue to revisit, how we can further reduce fuel consumption by employing better routing strategies, using different equipment, and avoiding needless trips.

But what about all the other petroleum-based products we are using? How can we apply the three R’s to them? It is interesting to note just how much of what we use is in some way tied to the petroleum industry. Everything from pots, trays, and plastic liners to fertilizer bags and irrigation pipe ultimately come from oil. If each of us could find a way to reduce our use of these items, or otherwise recycle or reuse them, we would do ourselves and our country a good service.

We can reduce the use of plastics by finding alternatives. Ball-and-burlap and peat pots, for example, work just as well as plastic containers. We can also buy mulch and fertilizer in bulk when possible to avoid using bags.

What cannot be reduced may be recycled or reused. Some larger wholesale nurseries recycle plastic pots and trays. I say recycle, but they actually may use them again. Either way, the plastic (and petroleum) is not wasted, nor will it take up valuable space in a landfill. Unused or leftover irrigation pipe and connectors would seemingly be good candidates for a recycling bin — if not at your supplier’s place, then most certainly at the place where they were manufactured.

Many manufacturers today are very conscientious about reusing and recycling unused material. We should be just as conscientious. No, we do not have sophisticated technology that transports byproducts back to a recycling machine, but we can find out where to take our unused products so they can be put back into the oil stream.

I know, what we do seems like a drop in the bucket compared to what needs to be done. But the world is changing, and it is using more petroleum everyday. I recall the scene in the movie, “The Graduate,” when a family friend advises Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) to find a career in “plastics.” Good advice then because designers have found especially creative ways to use plastics. Even better advice today would be “plastic recycling” because we need to be equally creative in finding ways to reuse materials that are limited in supply.

Look around your facility and notice what you may be taking to the landfill or otherwise throwing away. Chances are, much of it is plastic, and a large percentage of that may actually be reusable or recyclable. Our industry is big and getting bigger, and anything that we can do to reduce our consumption of petroleum today will pay even bigger dividends tomorrow.

12/05

By Rod Dickens, PLANET Contributing Writer