Making a sustainable plant pot
At Tops Day Nurseries, we love activities that are fun, creative, and kind to our planet. Making sustainable plant pots from waste paper is a simple way for children to explore nature, recycling, and gardening.
Using materials like old newspapers or scrap paper, children can create biodegradable pots, decorate them, and plant a seedling to care for as it grows. It’s a hands-on activity that encourages creativity, responsibility, and an understanding of how small actions can help the environment.
Below is a simple guide to making your own sustainable plant pot.
What do we need:
- Waste Paper (using other or our own waste), used photocopy paper (provided nothing confidential on it), newspaper or any paper except shiny paper which is not compostable, sugar paper, compliment slips.
- Bottle or wooden mould to wrap paper around.
- Scissors (optional)
Method:
- Choose some paper
- Cut, or fold and tear paper into strips to width required (height of pot)
- Option to decorate the paper (both don’t paint on both sides or it sticks to the mould!)
- Wrap around bottle or mould, 4-6 layers, torn bit down.
- Fold/wrap paper to make the bottom of pot, ensuring no holes/gaps where compost will escape.
- Squash onto table or into pot maker base.
- Remove from mould
- Children can further decorate with their own artwork
- Fill with earth/compost
- Plant watered seedling
Outcomes:
Children – purposeful activity, enjoying “work”, physical development – fine motor control, mental wellbeing, contributing to setting/parents income, creativity
Can include cylinder shape, number, biology, gardening, making choices and decisions, exchange of products for money, intro to money, counting, physical well being from working with earth. Turn taking, sharing, creativity, collaboration, sharing resources, conversations about plans.
Language words such as pot, plant, roll, cylinder, earth, compost, colours, cylinder, names of plants being sown eg spider plant, bigger, smaller, strip, cut, tear, delicate
Entrepreneurship can be encouraged by selling the potted plants to family and friends, or asking for donations towards nursery funds.
Nursery/Setting – fun activity, using waste paper, selling the pots to fund raise.
Climate Benefits – using waste paper instead of buying plastic pots, avoiding plastic waste, biodiversity, could be vegetables, flowers, plants as food for butterflies and bees, tree seeds, to suit local environment.
Parents – pride in children, gardening at home or with extended families, food, free or low cost.
