How Can Flowers Help A Drive For Sustainability?
July 10, 2024
Sustainability is one of those buzzwords that everyone has heard of and most would support, but it can also seem quite vague. After all, it may be asked, how can sustainability operate in some very different industries when the things they do and how they produce their goods vary?
It is fair to ask this question of every company in every sector individually. For a florist, it may seem simple; after all, flowers are, by definition, organic. To the layperson, it may seem a simple business of growing and cutting this season’s blooms for delivery while planting seeds to produce the next batch.
However, it isn’t quite so simple. There are still issues to consider like the carbon footprint of imported flowers or the energy sources used for heated greenhouses and artificial (nocturnal) photosynthesis. As Which? has noted, some of the latter are very energy-intensive.
The fact is that most flowers in the UK, including ours, come from just across the sea in the Netherlands. The journey is not, therefore, a long one (whereas some flowers can come from as far away as Africa).
For Dutch flowers, the source of electricity for those greenhouses is what matters. Historically, these have consumed as much as nine per cent of gas used in the Netherlands, although this is across the whole agriculture sector, not just flowers.
However, times are changing, with the Dutch government pushing the industry towards using more renewables instead. The higher cost of gas after the Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed this further, not least as the Dutch government has refused to exploit huge known offshore gas reserves for environmental reasons.
Over the next few years, we can expect the Dutch flower industry to be powered more and more by the most sustainable fuels, which is great for the climate – and for keeping our planet a great place for flowers to grow.