Mt. Clemens, Mich.-The Macomb County Commission is getting behind a local high school project to use stickers to identify environmentally friendly fertilizer sold in stores selling lawn and garden products. The commission had planned to provide $1,000 for 10,000 of the bright green “lake safe” stickers from county money until one commissioner offered to foot the bill personally because “it seemed like a very good program.” Commissioner Philis (cq) DeSaele told Green Markets the South Lake high school Tree Huggers student club started distributing the stickers, which are the size of half a postcard, to hardware and home improvement stores two years ago in St. Clair Shores, where students convinced six businesses to use them on bags of selected fertilizers. Since then, DeSaele noted, there has been a noticeable increase in sales of the environmentally-friendly fertilizers, creating more awareness that the county is in the middle of the Great Lakes area, which contains 20 percent of the fresh water in the world. Now the project will go countywide to include possibly all 65 businesses in Macomb that sell fertilizer. The ACO and English Gardens stores are participating, DeSaele said, and she has personally tried to convince Lowe’s to join. She said stickers will be used on only low and no phosphorous and slow release and that contains no pesticides.
Transparency Across the Fertilizer Value-Chain