On plastic, paralysis, and an old friend who is reimagining waste.
A few weeks ago I rang an old friend and caught myself scrolling through her website while the phone was still ringing. I've known Philippa Abbott nearly my whole life. She was in my sister's year at school, and because we lived around the corner from the school gate, ours was the house that was filled with kids in the afternoons. Even then it was obvious Philippa was a particular kind of person — fiercely bright, and constitutionally unable to accept that things are the way they are just because that's how she found them. Some people you know about ‘early’.
Even so, I sat there on a grey Daylesford afternoon, looking at what she has built, and thought: when did this happen? How?
What she has built is Pelagic Earth. It takes plastic waste — including the degraded, end-of-the-line plastic nobody else wants, ocean plastic among it — and transforms it into pavers and bricks. Real building materials, certified for retaining walls, laid by landscapers who tell her it's easier to work with than concrete. Her team has not managed to break the material. And here is the detail I haven't stopped thinking about: the more broken-down the plastic, the shorter its exhausted polymer chains, the stronger the paver it makes. The waste of the waste — the stuff furthest past saving — makes the strongest material of all.
She builds relocatable factories inside shipping containers and drops them where the waste is. Anywhere in the world! Where the industry allows half a year to stand up a manufacturing plant, hers is running within days. She’s pushing that envelop further with a desire to reduce that to 72 hours! Every square metre of her pavers locks away more than 200 kilograms of carbon for the century ahead, and there's a research partnership with Melbourne University picking apart why the material performs the way it does — why something made entirely of discarded plastic and recycled glass behaves better than the things we make from scratch. When she wanted to introduce it to the world, she took the first prototypes ever pressed and made them into a sculpture, then showed it in a sixteenth-century palazzo in Brera during Milan Design Week, where it was shortlisted for a sustainability award. Her reasoning was very Philippa. What is the antithesis of waste? Art.
Waste, she says, is in the eye of the beholder. So is beauty. But I never thought I’d see a recycled plastic paver as utterly considered and beautiful as what she has created, but of course Philippa has. As they say, you can leave an industrial design degree, but how it shapes the way you see the world and resolves problems through design, down to the tiny details, never leaves you.
I've been carrying that phone call around ever since, and I have plenty to keep my brain full at the moment, so it’s probably worthwhile knowing why.
I spend a lot of my week in cafés — it's where I thaw out after the garden on a bleak winter’s day, wrote most of my book, and where half of Daylesford conducts its business, which means I spend a lot of time talking with the young people who work in them. Lately, some of those conversations have had a weight in them that feels difficult not to take stock of. For some of the twenty-somethings I talk to, the state of the world isn't an anxiety that comes and goes. It has settled into something paralysing. More than one has told me they've decided not to have children. Not as a throwaway line — as a settled position, arrived at with grief, over years.
I'd be lying if I said those thoughts never find me. They do. I think about the world my children are inheriting, usually at two in the morning, the way you do. But mine pass. I have a garden to walk out into and decades of watching soil come back from nothing. What hits hard is watching people at the very beginning of their adult lives carry a despair that assumes the story is a fait a comple.
The story is not finished. I have evidence. And I've known her since she was a kid.
Because despair, up close, always rests on the same unspoken assumption — that the problem is too big, and whatever one person does won't matter. And then there's Phillipa, who looked at one of the most despised materials on earth and saw a resource so valuable she has organised her entire life around it. The pot you cannot recycle is, to her, simply a beautifully designed paver that hasn't happened yet.
Which brings me, as most things do, back to the garden — because the garden has a huge plastic problem of its own, and I am not immune to that.
Out by my pottingshed, tucked under the house or benches, are stacks and stacks of black plastic pots, sorted into their sizes. I keep only the black ones, because I like my pots to match. I'm one of those people. And maybe the joke is on me, because black is the one colour recycling can't cope with: the carbon-black pigment is invisible to the sorting sensors, so even a black pot dutifully placed in the recycling mostly ends up in landfill. It creeps in everywhere, this stuff — the trays, the labels, the netting that outlives the crop it was bought to protect. Even a thoughtful garden accumulates it. Mine most definitely has.
When I left Oak & Monkey Puzzle — five acres, nine years of accumulation — for the 515 square metres of Little Cottage on a Hill, I had to cull my life radically to fit. I watched Marie Kondo, slightly desperate, and borrowed her question: does it spark joy? It turned out to be exactly the right question, and it’s never really left. It's the layer still running in my head years later — why I don't wear synthetic clothes anymore, why the microfibre cloths went, why the cascading volcano of takeaway containers that lives in everyone's kitchen cupboard no longer lives in mine. Not because I'm extreme about any of it. I just don't want to live that way anymore. The black pots are useful; I propagate constantly, and they earn their keep. But I can tell you honestly, they do not spark joy. What sparks joy is the toilet roll tubes I save all year, each one holding a seedling, each one destined to soften and disappear into the soil that grows the plant on. Nothing to wash, nothing to stack, nothing to send anywhere.
July is Plastic Free July — a movement that began in 2011 in a small office in Western Australia and now moves more than 170 million people across 190 countries. Sit with that arithmetic for a moment. A handful of people in Perth chose one small change each and asked their friends to do the same, and fifteen years later a measurable fraction of humanity is doing it with them. Many hands make light work. It's the oldest wisdom we have, and it happens to be the actual mechanism by which the world changes. One reused pot is invisible. A hundred and seventy million of them is a supply chain forced to respond. It's Phillipa, somewhere, with a factory in a shipping container, suddenly viable — because all those hands built the world her idea needed.
So here’s the gift of a head full of thoughts and ruminations. I've written a small free guide called The Plastic Free Garden — the little swaps that work, the ones that cost nothing, and the few that are probably far easier than you'd think, written for whatever part of the world you're standing in, sowing or tucking away the last of the leaves in winter. It offers a proposition that you do one thing. Choose one change, do it consistently (or at least as best as you and the shape of your life can), and let it become how you garden. Then, if you know a gardener who'd love it, send it on. It's free to share — that's the intention, the invitation, and the ripple.
And if you're one of the young ones, one of the ones carrying the dread: this piece is mostly for you. I won't tell you the fear is irrational, because it isn't. But somewhere right now, a woman I've known since she was a kid is throwing pavers off a pallet — pavers made from the most hopeless plastic in the ocean — and they bounce. The story has only just started. It is being written by more hands than you know, and there is plenty of room in it for yours too.
Download The Plastic Free Garden — free. It's my gift for Plastic Free July: read it, use it, and share it with anyone who might enjoy it. Start with one small change. Be one of the many hands.
The Productive Garden Companion (Murdoch Books) is available for presale now at here.
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You may want to check out my related content below:
The Power of Noticing - How a Garden Wander Led Me to Morels
Designing for Expansiveness - Small Space Garden Strategies at Little Cottage on a Hill
The Wicking Bed Garden - How I Harvested 100kg of Produce in 50 Days—And How You Can Too
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Thanks so much for following along.
Natasha xx
