At the Groenrijk Garden Centre in Zuidoostbeemster business never stops. The garden centre covers an area of one and a half hectares, divided up between greenhouses and open space.

“We sell all sorts of articles for outside and inside the home,” explains Gert Jan Waterhout, the garden centre’s owner and manager. The centre attracts around a hundred thousand customers a year, who come to buy indoor and outdoor plants and flowers, pet supplies, stone, gravel, novelty and Christmas gifts, as well as furniture.

This means a correspondingly high volume of packaging materials. Mr Waterhout says; “Goods from China, in particular, often have three layers of packaging covering them. Each week we have between five and ten cubic metres of cardboard and two cubic metres of plastics. We used to dispose of all that in two containers. What did not fit, was stacked next to the containers – but of course, with just a bit of wind, it got blown all over the place. I wanted to get rid of this rubbish!”