Meijer is encouraging people to bring their plastic flowerpots and trays – regardless of where they originally purchased the plants or flowers – to any Meijer Garden Center to be recycled.

Since Meijer began collecting plastic containers on recycling carts in 2014, the retailer has helped recycle 1,825 tons of plastic plant containers. In addition to keeping plastic out of the landfill, recycled plastic uses less energy and emits less carbon in its production compared to virgin plastic. Below is a news release with more information and a link to images.

Meijer works with three main suppliers of annual flowers, all of which are in Michigan: Masterpiece Flower Company in Byron Center, Kalamazoo Flower Group in Kalamazoo and Meadowridge Inc. in Zeeland. The three suppliers provide Meijer with more than 6.5 million plants each year, and work together to consolidate, sort and ship the containers back to East Jordan Plastics, which continues the cycle.

In April, Meijer donated $1 million to the charitable arm of the Council of the Great Lakes Region to clean up Midwestern beaches and waterways and provide greater awareness about the scale of the plastics pollution problem in the Great Lakes.

In November, Meijer wrapped up a pilot project with Dow (NYSE: DOW) that enabled a new paving technique using recycled plastic bags to create a more durable parking lot at the retailer’s Holland, Michigan, supercenter. The project used approximately 12,500 pounds of post-consumer recycled plastic, which is the equivalent of 944,000 plastic grocery bags.

In January 2020, Meijer opened its first small format store, Woodward Corner Market, without single-use plastic bags. The initiative was launched in April at Bridge Street Market in Grand Rapids.

Since 2014, each Meijer store has collection bins inside its front entrance vestibules for customers to deposit clean, dry plastic bags and films, including single-use, bread, dry cleaning, produce and water softener bags. In 2021, Meijer recycled 7.6 million pounds of plastic bags that were sent to its distribution centers for remanufacturing into decking.