Greening the green industry

CLEVELAND—Attendees at the 59th annual International Plant Propagators Society (IPPS) Eastern Region meeting in mid-October focused on how businesses could become more sustainable, and make more money from consumers’ interest in green.

Saving the earth
Anna Ball, president and CEO of Ball Horticultural Co., told attendees the horticulture industry had done a poor job marketing its sustainability credentials to consumers.

“We still don’t have the message out there that we’re the green industry,” she said.

For a company’s sustainability initiatives to be successful, she said, everyone has to support them, and they have to be a part of the company’s entire approach to business. Ball employee suggestions have led to more sustainable practices inside that company: From a reduction in its chemical and water use to elimination of Styrofoam plates in the company cafeteria.

“You’ve got to have everyone involved in it,” she said.

Ball said garden centers and nurseries have many ways to make consumers’ interest in green pay off: recycling their plastic, green roofs, rain gardens and rain barrels, edible plants and slow gardening.

But the best way a company can increase its sustainability, she said, is to reduce shrink and increase the number of viable, salable plants that they grow. In a recent study Ball did on the seeds it grew in Costa Rica, only 12 percent made it into the ground in customers’ homes. Eighty-eight percent were lost in distribution, production and retail.

Saving time
Jeremy Deppe, general manager at Spring Meadow Nursery in Grand Haven, Mich., said his nursery used a lean production model to make itself more efficient.

Technology has improved the nursery and production business: Machines now fill flats, water plants and adjust chemical applications based on the weather. But, after a point, new technology can only do so much. You still have to have people doing the work.

So the company implemented a lean flow work model this year to increase efficiency. Last year, four packing lines took five people each to produce 46 boxes of plants every hour. Now, three and a half people on each line can produce 58 boxes an hour without working any harder.

All it took was a stopwatch, Deppe said. By timing each task, managers can determine the best way to break down work and the order in which tasks are accomplished. Through this approach, the company saw 20 percent gains in efficiency in its sticking and transplanting, and 25 percent gains in trimming.

Saving money
Nurseries might be sitting on money they didn’t know they had. Steve Anderson, co-owner of APC Recycling in Killingworth, Conn., spoke on the logistics of recycling the many types of plastics a typical operation goes through each year.

Anderson said there are lots of reasons to recycle – it’s good for the environment, for one – but the best reason is the economic benefit. By his calculation, a nursery could save as much as $4,000 a year by recycling old greenhouse film, pots and irrigation tubing instead of paying someone to landfill them.

There’s a consistent demand in the market for these plastics, he said, and much of them are shipped overseas.

He offered these tips to a company looking to recycle its plastic:

• Buy products like film and pots with recycling in mind to maximize profit on the back end.
• Leverage desirable plastics to get recycling companies to remove the lower-quality stuff, too.
• To keep your stuff desirable, keep it as dry as possible. “Nobody wants to pay for water,” Anderson says.
• Partner with other businesses in your area to get enough material to make recycling profitable. “It’s very tough to recycle if you have a small operation,” he says.

The author, Chuck Bowen, is associate editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine. Reach him at cbowen@gie.net.

Bill Barnes, president of IPPS Eastern Region, greets attendees at the organization’s 59th annual meeting, in Cleveland.

Anna Ball, president and CEO of Ball Horticultural Co., told attendees the horticulture industry had done a poor job marketing its sustainability credentials to consumers.