We’ve seen the future of garden strimming, and it’s biodegradable!

Regular readers or visitors to The Secret Acre, will know that strimming has been a big part of our lives since moving in.

Only now, some six years on, does it feel like we have finally made good inroads into reclaiming the overgrown areas to put back into productive use. Each winter’s incremental progress requiring regular summer strimming to maintain the foothold.

So it’s fair to say our Stihl strimmer, with its familiar orange plastic strimmer line, has been well used. Leading to the equally familiar environmental angst of seeing bits of discarded orange plastic line across the garden.

Naturally I googled to see if anyone makes biodegradable strimming line. Surely someone must I thought? And yes they do! Biotrim is the world’s first oxo-biodegradable trimmer line from Oregon.

It’s a fairly new product, after ten years in development, and isn’t yet easily available in the UK, beyond a handful of trailblazing Ebay import businesses.

Undeterred, a small sample reel swiftly arrived in the post last year, and we said goodbye to orange plastic line pollution, and hello to Biotrim’s brown biodegradable alternative.

So how has it been? In a word, great!

Can’t say I’ve noticed any obvious differences in performance, except perhaps it pays out ever so slightly faster maybe. That, or we are just strimming more diligently, happy in the knowledge we are not adding more polluting plastic to the environment.

Of course at the back of my mind was one remaining question. Is it one of those greenwash bio-plastics that actually takes 100s of years to biodegrade. Apparently not. The French certifying body says the whole process takes between 5 and 10 years once the line is in contact with the soil, after which no trace of the line remains. Read the full details here. 

Surely this new product is the future of strimming. We highly recommend you give a go for yourself. And we also need to shout about it too. We need UK Garden Centres to start stocking it. We need Council contracts to mandate its use. We need to consign the polluting orange plastic strimmer line to the dustbin of history.