It’s Time to Eliminate Single-Use Plastic from CEA

Why Single-Use Plastics Are Undermining the Sustainability of Indoor Farming

As Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) scales up to meet global food demands, it positions itself as the answer to many of agriculture’s most pressing problems: land scarcity, climate unpredictability, water use, and supply chain inefficiencies.

But beneath the surface of many vertical farms and greenhouses lies a mounting contradiction—a dependence on single-use plastics that challenges the very claims of environmental sustainability.

If CEA is to live up to its promise, we must confront and eliminate this reliance.

Single-Use Plastics: The Industry’s Dirty Secret

From seedling trays and rockwool cubes to grow bags, propagation sponges, net pots, and plastic sleeves for substrates like peat or coir, single-use plastics are woven into the operational fabric of most CEA facilities.

Their use is so embedded in standard operating procedures that many growers don’t question it—until they look at the waste room after a single harvest cycle.

In commercial operations, plastic waste can exceed 300 kg per harvest per 1,000 square metres—the equivalent of tens of thousands of disposable units that are either incinerated, landfilled, or at best, downcycled.

Why Recycling Isn’t Good Enough

A common defence is: “We use recyclable plastics.”

But recyclability is a theoretical property. Actual recycling rates in agriculture and horticulture are dismal. Here’s why:

• Contamination with organics (roots, nutrients, algae, and biofilms) renders many plastics unrecyclable.

• Complex, multilayer materials (e.g. plastic sleeves on coir blocks) are not accepted by municipal recycling streams.

• Recycled plastics are often downcycled, not turned into equivalent-quality materials—so they still exit the loop after one use.

• Recycling is energy- and resource-intensive, requiring transport, cleaning, sorting, and processing.
  

In short, recyclable ≠ circular. A plastic pot used once and sent to industrial recycling still contributes heavily to a system that is extractive, inefficient, and ultimately unsustainable.

The Packaging Cascade: More Plastics = More Waste

What’s often overlooked is that the more single-use plastic components you introduce into a farm, the more single-use packaging is needed to support them.

For example:

• Coir blocks, foam cubes or plastic substrates themselves typically arrive wrapped in additonal film plastic or heat-sealed shrink wrap

• Pallets are stacked with corrugated cardboard liners, pulp trays, and poly strapping

• Propagation trays and net pots often arrive nested in bulk, requiring plastic bags, sleeves, or expanded pulp packaging to prevent damage
  

This cascade of packaging waste adds another layer to the environmental burden—and none of it contributes to plant growth or nutritional output. It’s waste embedded in your input chain, increasing your:

• Carbon footprint per crop cycle

• Labour time for unpacking and disposing

• Waste hauling and processing costs
  

And because most of these packaging materials can’t be recycled once damp, they end up in landfill or incinerators, eroding your farm’s sustainability metrics.

Microplastics: The Invisible Contaminant — Now Washed Ashore

While large volumes of waste are visible, microplastics are the hidden threat.

As single-use plastics degrade—from mechanical wear, UV exposure, or repeated irrigation—they begin to fragment. This creates microplastics that can:

• Circulate in irrigation loops, clogging pumps, emitters, and sensors

• Enter the root zones of plants, where the long-term biological effects are still poorly understood

• Accumulate in drainage effluent, raising concerns for wastewater management and local ecosystems
  

But it doesn’t end there.

The photo below shows microplastics washed up on a beach, taken by the GyroPlant team themselves — bits of synthetic debris that began as packaging, substrate wrap, or other disposable plastic. These fragments can travel thousands of kilometres from their source, breaking into finer pieces with every cycle of sun, salt, and abrasion. Once in the environment, these microplastics are often mistaken for food by marine life and coastal wildlife — from fish and seabirds to shellfish and filter feeders. Ingesting plastic can cause internal blockages, starvation, or chemical contamination, and these particles have already been found throughout the global food chain — including in seafood and table salt. The materials we use in controlled farms today can quietly become the ecological hazards of tomorrow.

MicroPlastics on the beach

This is the unspoken legacy of disposability. Not just landfill. Not just carbon. But tiny, persistent pollutants in places they never belonged.

Replacing disposable plastics with reusable, stable materials is a critical step in minimising microplastic generation at the source.

Fragile Supply Chains, Heavy Footprints

The problems with single-use plastics don’t end at waste—they often start with unstable global supply chains.

Substrate products such as coir, peat blocks, and synthetic foams are often manufactured thousands of kilometres away, packaged in plastic, and shipped globally. For larger farms, sea freight is standard. But smaller urban farms or R&D labs often resort to airfreighting single use substrates and plastic grow media just to maintain operations.

In a system dependent on fresh inputs every cycle, even small disruptions ripple through production schedules.

Reusable systems like GyroCup™ remove this fragility by localising reuse, cutting dependence on imports, freight, and packaging entirely.

The LCA Perspective: Plastics Are a Major Sustainability Bottleneck

Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) are increasingly used to benchmark the environmental performance of CEA systems against conventional agriculture. These tools measure environmental impact across a product or system’s entire life—from raw material extraction to end-of-life disposal.

When single-use plastics—and their associated packaging, microplastic risks, and supply chains—are included in LCAs, several impacts spike:

• Embodied carbon: Plastic manufacturing from fossil fuels has a high CO₂ footprint.

• Transport emissions: Lightweight but bulky, these materials increase freight and handling volumes.

• Waste disposal and degradation: Single-use plastics don’t just disappear; they linger—in landfills, wastewater, and ecosystems.
  

Multiple LCA studies have shown that input-heavy vertical farms can only match or exceed the sustainability of field-grown produce when material reuse is optimised. Plastics, packaging, and fragile sourcing are three of the biggest culprits tipping the scales the wrong way.

The True Cost of Convenience

Why are single-use plastics and their packaging still so widely used?

• Low upfront cost

• Widespread availability

• Ease of use—no cleaning, just replace and repeat
  

But these conveniences come at a cost:

• Ongoing material and shipping costs

• Labour and disposal management

• Fragile global sourcing that threatens resilience

• Microplastics and waste that undermine claims of 'clean food'

• LCA metrics that fall apart under scrutiny
  

Let’s Grow Without Waste — And Without Regret

From single-use plastic grow trays to single use plastic substrates, the legacy of single-use in farming extends far beyond the grow room. The environmental costs are cumulative, persistent, and increasingly incompatible with the goals of sustainable agriculture.

At GyroPlant, we’ve built a reusable, substrate-free growing system that eliminates the need for single-use plastic, excess packaging, and the fragile supply chains that go with them.