Seeds of change

A college lecture on sustainability prompted a life-changing move for Back to the Roots co-founders Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez.

The pair met in a business ethics class at the University of California Berkeley and were inspired to start their own gardening company after learning about using coffee ground waste to grow mushrooms. Velez turned down an offer to go into investment banking in New York City, and Arora turned down an offer to go into consulting. Using a $5,000 grant, the two started an urban farm in Oakland, California, in 2010—the beginning of Back to the Roots.

“It’s been a wild, wild journey,” Arora says.

The company started by upcycling coffee grounds from Peet’s Coffee and Starbucks. Arora says at one point, the two had collected more than 3 million pounds of coffee grounds and used them to grow oyster mushrooms they then would sell to grocery giants like Whole Foods as well as farmers markets and restaurants.

“Over the next handful of years, it kind of evolved from a farm in the middle of Oakland to really becoming a gardening company … with a mission to help inspire a whole new generation to reconnect with the land, reconnect with their food and grow their own food,” Arora says.

Arora and Velez have continued to explore ways to lessen their company’s environmental footprint, including incorporating postconsumer recycled (PCR) plastic into packaging for several of their products, such as Back to the Roots’ plant food and wildflower seed mix, hydroponic grow kit and seed-starting trays.

The soil category, however, has presented challenges when it comes to incorporating PCR plastic into its packaging—until now.

In September, Back to the Roots announced that, beginning in the 2024 gardening season, it would transition its organic potting mix to packaging made from 100 percent PCR plastic in a move the company says is a first for the soil sector and in a push for sustainability. The transition puts a spotlight on how recycling fits into the lawn and garden puzzle.

“Even in this category, we’re like, ‘How do we try to continue to push the envelope and do things a bit better if we can?’” Arora says.

Confronting the challenge

Arora says all products offered by Back to the Roots have been designed to make them as recyclable or “least impactful” as possible, including using ceramic planters, compostable trays and recycled packaging. When its research and development team started looking into its outdoor line of plant foods, it started experimenting with PCR materials.

“Plant foods are much easier because they’re mainly [stored] indoors,” Arora says. “As we were learning, we started talking to different suppliers and started introducing [PCR content] into it. We launched our hydroponics kit that we use a lot of recycled materials in as well.”

But soil, he says, has been the “holy grail” for the category, using hundreds of millions of pounds of single-use virgin plastic per year. Back to the Roots tweaked its soil so it no longer includes peat—a major emissions contributor—but no matter how environmentally friendly its soil is, it was still being packaged in single-use plastic bags.

“At the end of a weekend of gardening, you could have a trash can full of landfilled plastic soil bags,” he says.

The challenge with packaging soil into bags containing PCR plastic is mirroring the strength and printability aspects of virgin plastic.

The packaging needs to hold up when it’s stored on pallets or transported on a forklift, and it also needs to protect the soil from degrading. “You have tons of microbes in there,” Arora says. “They’re in high heat in the middle of spring and summer, 100-degree weather. Picture parking lots at Home Depot, [the soil is] sitting outside on asphalt baking in the sun with microbes inside, so it’s that shelf life and integrity that was important.”

The team at Back to the Roots was inspired by recycling technologies leveraged by consumer brands like Kind Bar, Mars and Unilever, and partnered with Cincinnati-based flexible packaging company ProAmpac to develop 100 percent PCR plastic packaging for its soil, with the recycled material certified under the International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC) Plus.

Because of the timing of gardening season, the transition to PCR packaging for soil will be complete next year, and Arora says other suppliers already have reached out hoping to get involved. “It’s pretty crazy to see the energy around this,” he says. “It’s been energizing to see momentum build and even our retail partners wanting to lean into this.

“If we can’t be the category that leans into sustainability and recycling and trying to do things a bit differently, how do you think any other retail category can lean in if lawn and garden can’t? … There’s just so much virgin single-use plastic in this category; it just seems so antithetical to what this category should stand for.”

Phased approach

Incorporating PCR content into its packaging is what Arora calls Phase 1 of Back to the Roots’ greater recycling mission. The next step is to close the loop on its packaging by designing it to be recyclable.

“Some of the technology we’re trialing now can help the bags break down, then eventually [it’s about] getting to a place where it’s just reusing bags over and over and over again,” Arora says.

“We need to think of them like a closed-loop system that we’ve already taken enough oil and gas, we should be able to reuse these things over and over again. … That’s not to say no plastic, because just thinking about all the medical devices, how much stuff is going to need plastic in our lives, it’s just how do we think about the circular ecosystem?”

Arora says the lawn and garden industry is in the infancy of rethinking its approach to packaging, but he hopes continued advancements in recycling boost demand for PCR content.

“It’s this idea of how do we get closer and closer to this circular thing,” he says, “because to me, it’s not just about sustainability—doing more with less—we still want to all grow the economy, grow our businesses and [figure out] how you do it with less.”

The author is managing editor of Recycling Today and can be reached at mmcnees@gie.net.