What’s this title got to do with gardening, you might wonder.

Good question, indeed. Here are a few things that come to my mind– and maybe a surprise at the end.

Most shower curtains or shower curtain liners are made of plastic. Plastic, you may have heard, is not particularly good for the environment. To start, petroleum, a limited resource, is used to make plastic. For the most part, plastic items do not necessarily have a long use-life. When they are no longer in good condition, fashionable, or new, plastic items are disposed of. Although the recycling industry has certainly grown in our lifetimes, most no-longer-needed plastic items end up in the landfill, where they will slowly– as in 500 years or more slowly– breakdown.

I’m not anti-plastic however. There are many plastic items which make life better for us all, from medical equipment to children’s car seats to plastic lenses. All of those seem to be good uses of plastic. When there are better alternatives, however, like in the “paper vs plastic vs reusable” bag debate, we need to become informed so that we can make better choices– or at least recognize the results of and our responsibility for the choices that we make.

It doesn’t take much thought to see the limitations of plastic shower curtains. A new one fresh out of the wrapper has the distinct odor that can be characterized as off-gassing, if you think about it. Cheap shower curtain liners blow about as one showers, and heavier, expensive ones are… more expensive. The crevices of plastic curtains tend to get gunky and that leads to mold. Plastic shower curtains are not easy to clean either; to get them really clean, scrubbing is required. I’ve tried machine washing and I don’t advise it; plastic shower curtains are not up to the vigorous agitation. When a plastic shower curtain gets worn, torn, or too much trouble to clean, the common option is to throw them away. One might manage a reuse as a drop cloth, but there’s not much use left in an old plastic shower curtain.

When we got to a shower curtain replacement crossing a few years ago, we decided to give a cloth shower curtain a try. Friends of ours had reported that they were delighted with theirs. We ordered and used a hemp shower curtain for a couple years. We liked a lot of things about that shower curtain, including its environmental friendliness, but we had a few issues. The cloth was heavy, which didn’t make drying very easy or quick. The heavy weight fabric also made for a more awkward washday. It tended to get a bit musty and eventually a little mold set in.

About two years ago, we decided to replace that shower curtain with a cotton fabric shower curtain from Greenfeet, a reasonably priced online store specializing in “practical, well-made products with a green twist.” The fabric weight is much lighter, which makes for more light in the bathroom and a speedier drying time. It’s very easy to take down, launder and hang up again. Finally, the cotton version of the shower curtain is nearly 1/3 the cost of a hemp shower curtain.

Now for the surprise. What do you do with a cloth shower curtain when its no longer needed? This summer, I plan to find out in another “compost experiment.” I plan to use the old hemp shower curtain as landscaping cloth in our yard, in an area where I want to keep down weeds. We’ll put yard waste on top of the cloth to help keep the weeds down and to encourage the cloth in its decomposition. I plan to keep track of the process with post and photos.