Plant care has a plastic habit
Bottles, pots, trays, and fertilizer granules wrapped in polymer that stays behind after the nutrients are gone. This page is our honest summary of what the research shows, and why we refused to put plastic in a plant pot. Every claim links to its source.
Most plant food is plastic first, food second
Walk down any garden aisle and look at what you are actually buying. Liquid concentrate in a plastic bottle. Granules in a plastic-lined bag. Slow-release prills where every single granule is wrapped in a polymer shell. Even the products marketed as gentle or natural usually ship in plastic.
The packaging is not the only issue. With coated slow-release fertilizer, the plastic is not around the product, it is the product. The coating is the mechanism: it meters nutrients out through a polymer skin. When the nutrients are finished, the skin stays in the soil.
What the research shows
Coated fertilizer leaves its coating behind
Conventional controlled-release fertilizer wraps each granule in a polymer shell so nutrients seep out slowly. It works. The problem is what happens next: the nutrients leave, and the shell does not.
When researchers sampled nineteen rice paddy fields in Japan for capsules from coated fertilizer, they found them in every single field, at concentrations averaging 144 milligrams per kilogram of soil. source
Regulators have started to respond. The European Union adopted a restriction on intentionally added microplastics that removes microplastic-containing fertilizing products from the EU market from 17 October 2028. source
We designed BioPod for a shelf where that coating is not an option.
Half a billion pots a year
Gardening runs on plastic that was never built to be recycled. An estimated 500 million plastic pots, trays, and flats are produced in the United States each year, and roughly 5 percent are recycled. The rest are landfilled or burned. source
The reason is economic, not moral. Horticultural containers are moulded from mixed low-value resins that recyclers do not want. The Missouri Botanical Garden ran the largest horticultural plastic recycling program in the country and ended it, because the material had become worth less than nothing.
Only about 9 percent of all the plastic ever made has been recycled at all. source A plastic bottle of plant food is not a recycling story. It is a landfill story with extra steps.
What about dissolvable plastics?
Detergent-style pods use PVA, a synthetic polymer engineered to dissolve in water. It dissolves impressively. We tested it.
But dissolving is not the same as biodegrading. PVA is still a petroleum-derived polymer, and what happens to it after it dissolves depends on conditions downstream. The science on how completely it breaks down is still being debated, and regulators have not restricted it.
We are not going to tell you PVA is proven harmful, because that is not what the evidence says. We simply decided that a debated polymer was not something we wanted to put into living soil. Our shell is water-soluble paper, cellulose fibre from FSC-sourced wood pulp. Paper is not part of that debate.
Natasha Syed, founder. Environmental scientist.
Nutrients wrapped in paper
A pre-measured pod in a shell that dissolves in 30 to 90 seconds and leaves nutrients, not fragments.
No plastic in the product
No bottle, no polymer coating, no PVA film. The shell is cellulose paper from FSC-sourced pulp.
Nothing left in the soil
The shell dissolves on contact with water. What stays behind is plant food, not a shell to break down later.
Concentrated, not shipped as water
Dry nutrients in a 10-gram pod, rather than a heavy bottle of mostly water moved across the country.
Read it yourself
Citing sources is part of how we work. Every claim above traces to one of these.
- Geyer, Jambeck and Law. "Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made." Science Advances, 2017. science.org
- Katsumi et al. "Accumulation of microcapsules derived from coated fertilizer in paddy fields." Chemosphere, 2021. Microcapsules were detected in all nineteen fields surveyed. doi.org
- Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/2055 on synthetic polymer microparticles. Fertilizing products carry a transitional period to 17 October 2028. eur-lex.europa.eu
- ecoRI News. "Horticulture industry's problematic pot addiction," on US horticultural plastic volumes and recycling rates, citing Missouri Botanical Garden estimates. ecori.org
Plant food without the plastic
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