Recycled gear makes gardening even greener

Discarded plastic is being made into work gloves, rainbarrels and buckets. Worn-out tires are being converted into weed-smothering mulch and durable walkways.

Beverly Schor is founder of West County Gardener, a San Francisco-based company that creates garden and work gloves from recycled plastic bottles.

"We do a lot of testing on fibers and found these gloves are just as durable, just as soft, as any made from natural materials," Schor said. "We think their wearability is better than leather. Among other things, you can simply throw them into a washer and dryer."

Turning recycled plastic into fiber began in the 1980s during a time of gasoline shortages, she said. As prices soared for petrochemical-based plastic, mills discovered practical ways to convert the less expensive recycled substance into carpeting.

"But carpets are coarse," said Schor, a gardener and former sports apparel designer. "I started looking around for another raw material and found a Korean company that could make something finer (from plastic bottles) for textiles."

The sturdy but soft, padded gloves retail at around $19.95 a pair. Every recycled glove produced means one fewer 8-ounce plastic bottle tossed into a landfill, Schor said.

"In 2010, we will be retooling and taking that to two bottles. Everything but the palm (on the gloves) will be 100 percent recycled, and we're even working on that."

Americans generated 254 million tons of trash, and recycled and composted about 85 tons of that in 2007, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said. That works out to a recycling rate of 33.4 percent. Those figures represent municipal solid waste — things commonly used and then thrown away, such as food scraps, grass clippings, old tires, furniture and appliances. It does not include industrial, hazardous or construction waste.

Making greater use of organic materials reduces the amount of solid waste in landfills.