Environment – Growing garden plastics

I’ve been in my little cottage for a long time, so I have made lots of improvements towards its sustainability. I’ve installed a new roof, solar panels, double glazing, underfloor and wall insulation, and a wood burner that heats my house and water, and cooks my meals. We’ve done kitchen and bathroom renovations using environmentally friendly, durable materials. We’ve turned the whole section into vege and flower gardens, there’s a glasshouse and a shade house, extra rainwater and irrigation collection and distribution systems, and fruit trees.

My place is a bit like a lived-in ‘Grandad’s axe’. Everything has been replaced over time so it’s hard to know if it’s even the same axe – or house. But with all those improvements, the exterior and interior house colours of our choice, the internal and external remodelling to suit our ethics, the garden filled with perennial flowers and now mature trees I grew from seed, it feels like I’ve really put down roots.

There’s another legacy I’ve left though, if I dig a little deeper. It’s the microplastics in my garden. I try to live gently in the world and act as a kaitiaki, a caretaker, but as I plant my beans or weed my marigolds, I can see the multitude of microplastics accumulated from the breakdown of a macroplastic economy.

There’s the baling twine I used to tie my sunflowers to stakes, frayed and disintegrated. The plastic planter pots that have been stood on or splintered with the weed eater. Those millions of plant labels. Pegs (is that where they all go?), bread bag tags (just as well they’re finally banned), and nurdles from a toy gun my nephew had (who allowed those toys to be made!). There are shards of ice cream container, bits of brittle buckets, the orange bristles from a Mitre 10 broom. There are filmy bits of plastic that have come via the food scraps and compost bin, old twisty ties. There are bits I can’t see, microfibres from my polar fleece. My ‘organic garden’ is actually part polyethylene.

Microplastics are not just something happening in drainage systems, the harbour, on beaches, in Antarctica, clouds, the most remote lakes, and breast milk. They’re happening in my own backyard. It’s a plastic world, and getting worse. No wonder we are ingesting plastics as we eat, from even homegrown goods. All those fragments and nurdles are what we can see but the real tiny bits that are so ubiquitous, are even more of a worry.

I clean up plastic from beaches as gratitude for the privilege of visiting. And I clean up plastic from my garden to reduce that long-lived legacy. As non-plastic alternatives become available, I use them too. But we need Government regulation and industry adaptation to turn off the tap on plastic production, for a cleaner world, for our sake and for the sake of future inhabitants of our beautiful planet.