Review by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
I encountered Root Pouch for the first time at the Garden Press Event 2020 in the beginning of March that year and it immediately, for me, ticked a number of boxes in the green department.
Root Pouch distributed by Ikon International and they are fabric planting containers made from recycled water bottles and available from all good garden centers and also from Amazon. Personally I do not do Amazon because of the company's unethical practices in the treatment of their employees and others, but that is for everyone to decide for themselves.
Price – typical RRP Grey 3.8 ltr (1 Gal) – £1.05, 39 ltr (10 Gal) - £3.89
Better for the plant: The circling root from a black plastic pot will choke and harm a plant. The dense lateral root growth experienced in a non-circling self-pruning Root Pouch will not only easily provide the tree with healthy root uptake, but also offer the tree a strong supportive root structure to weather any storm, allowing the tree to grow for decades not years.
Better for the planet: Root Pouch is the only fabric pot company that manufactures its own fabric giving them full control of quality and consistency. Root Pouch uses on average 400 metric tons of plastic water bottles a year in making their containers. Giving single use plastics a second life.
Root Pouch only uses water bottles for recycling and diverted 1000 metric tons of water bottles from landfills and the oceans in 2019 and eliminates the need to create plastic pots using fossil fuels.
Root Pouch is the only pouch made from PET bottles and a textile weave for which the company has the patents. Other pouches more often than not contain unknown sourced plastics and no recycled textiles and their weave bears little in common with Root Pouch which has the optimal weave for Air Pruning/Entrapment.
The smaller pouches also make for great totes for the gardener (or even others) for tools.
https://rootpouch.com/
https://rootpouch.com/environment
Ikon-International.com
© 2020
