Southern Plants Named APCO 2024 Industry Sector Award Winner
Seven years of research and a machine that's the only one of its type in the Southern Hemisphere have earned Southern Plants the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation's 2024 Industry Sector Award for Agriculture and Nurseries (SME).
Most people never think twice about the pot their plant comes in. It gets the plant home, the plant goes into the garden and the pot usually ends up in the bin. For a nursery that grows around two million plants a year, that adds up to a lot of plastic.
On 26 November 2024, the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO) named Southern Plants its 2024 Industry Sector Award Winner (SME) for Agriculture and Nurseries. APCO leads the national effort to make packaging in Australia more sustainable, and its awards recognise businesses that have made real, measurable changes to the packaging they put into the market.
For us, the award is the result of one simple question: could the pot and label on every Southern Plants product go into a household recycling bin, rather than landfill?
It took far longer than we expected to answer.
The pot was the first step. Our pots are made from 95% recycled Australian PP5 plastic, so plastic that has already been used here is collected and made into something useful again. Our labels are made from 100% recycled plastic.
The harder problem was joining them. Labels are normally attached with staples or glue, and both make recycling harder. A pot with a metal staple or glue residue isn't clean, single-material plastic any more. We needed a way to fix the label to the pot that left nothing behind except recyclable plastic.
The answer was ultrasonic welding. High-frequency vibration fuses the label to the pot in a fraction of a second, with no staples and no glue. Finding a machine that could do this reliably, at our scale and on our pots, took seven years of research. The one we use is the only machine of its type in the Southern Hemisphere.
The result is a pot and label that can both go straight into your kerbside recycling bin.
This award caps off a big year. In August, Nursery and Garden Industry Victoria also named Southern Plants the winner of its Commitment to Environmental Stewardship award.
Awards are wonderful to receive, but they aren't why we did this. Our family has been growing plants for Australian gardens since 1946, and it never sat right that a plant, something that's good for the planet, should come in packaging that wasn't.
What you can do is simple. When you plant something with a Southern Plants label, take the pot and label off together and put them in your recycling bin. That last step is yours, and it's what closes the loop.
Better Plants. Better Planet.