The Life of a Pot: From Nursery to Garden and Back

For National Recycling Week (9–15 November 2026), we’re looking at the pot your plant comes home in. By the time you tip a kangaroo paw out of its pot and into the garden, that container has already done its job for months. It’s held the potting mix around the roots, let excess water drain away and kept the root ball together on the trip from our Mornington Peninsula nursery to your garden.

Before plastic nursery pots became common, some plants were grown in the ground, lifted for sale and carried home with their roots wrapped in damp paper. That worked for a short trip. A plant travelling further needed more protection against drying out and damage in transit. With a nursery pot, the plant could establish its roots in the same container it would travel in.

Why plastic? A rigid plastic pot is light enough to handle by the tray, holds its shape through repeated watering and keeps the roots and potting mix together when the plant is loaded onto a truck. Some biodegradable pots work well for seedlings that go into the ground soon after sowing. A pot that has to spend months under irrigation and then survive handling and transport has a different job. Some fibre pots soften when wet, while rigid plastic holds up through that longer journey.

The same durability that makes plastic useful in the nursery makes it worth keeping in use after planting. Our pots are designed to look good on display, with a more finished look than a basic nursery pot. Keep one on the patio for herbs or cuttings, or use it to pass a seedling on to a neighbour. When gardeners have more pots than they can reuse, a collection program gives the plastic another route. Retailers collect it, recyclers sort and reprocess it, and manufacturers can mould the recovered material into new pots and other nursery products. That’s how a closed loop works.

At Southern Plants, Mark Jackson worked on the part we could change at the nursery by designing the pot and label with recycling in mind. Our pots are made with 95% recycled Australian polypropylene (PP5), and our labels are made from 100% recycled plastic. The pot and its PP5 label can go into the same collection stream, so gardeners can return both in one trip. In 2024, APCO recognised our packaging work with its Agriculture and Nurseries industry sector award.

Ready to recycle your Southern Plants pot? Shake out the soil and give it a rinse. If your council accepts plastic plant pots in its kerbside recycling service, you can put the clean pot in your household recycling bin. Check your council’s guidance for the label too, as kerbside rules can differ by item.

You can also take the clean pot and its PP5 label to a participating Bunnings store. Mornington, Rosebud and Hastings are among the listed locations. Check the Bunnings plant pot recycling page before you go. Through Garden City Plastics’ program, collected PP5 is reprocessed in Australia, where it can become a pot for someone else’s garden.

Learn more about Garden City Plastics’ closed-loop recycling program.
https://gardencityplastics.com/services/closed-loop-packaging