Building a case for biopots

Sustainable practices were decades away when Jiffy Pots popped up in the U.S. nursery and greenhouse industry. It was the mid-1950s and George Ball discovered a Norwegian company that had found a way to turn peat into products.

Ball bought the rights and introduced what would become the first of the biocontainers, which was made of peat. Today, biocontainers are made out of everything from rice hulls and wheat straw to coir and cow manure.

Almost 60 years later, dozens of biopots are on the market or in the development stage, and claims about their effectiveness abound. Scientists decided it was time to investigate.

“There was information out there about the benefits of what are called biocontainers,” says James Schrader, an assistant scientist in the horticulture department at Iowa State University, “but no scientific evidence.” So researchers like Schrader began studies to determine if alternatives to the 800,000 tons of petroleum-based pots used by the nursery industry each year are viable for an increasingly green industry. Only about 2 percent of that mountain of plastic is reused or recycled, often because it’s inconvenient to consumers and labor intensive for growers to empty and clean.

“It’s a sea of plastic out there,” Schrader says. “Look across the landscape of a large operation and every one of those plants is in a plastic pot.”

The challenge is to find pots strong enough for production and shipping, but that break down quickly once they’re in the ground or compost pile. Biocontainers fall into two categories: plantable pots and bioplastic pots that are also made out of organic materials but are meant to degrade in a home or commercial composting situation.

With a $1.94 million grant from the USDA, Schrader and Kenny McCabe, research associate and graduate student in horticulture at ISU; led by William Graves, horticulture professor and associate dean of the university’s Graduate College, went to work on a five-year study that started 2011.

“We want to find a material that’s as good as or better than petroleum-based containers without the environmental consequences,” Schrader said.

They started with 46 different types of pots; some failed right away and were taken off the table.

Of the remaining containers, pots made of soy and polyactic acid performed the best. And the soy has the added benefit of providing nutrients as the mixture breaks down. The research continues.

Read the rest of the feature here.