Out-of-season cut flowers emerge as some of the products with the largest carbon footprint per pound generated at supermarket tills.
Mike Berners-Lee examines this question in his brilliant book ‘How Bad Are Bananas’. Although some estimates vary, Berners-Lee calculates: zero CO2e if picked from your garden, 350g CO2e if grown in Kenya and flown by air, and a whopping 2.1kg CO2e if grown in a heated greenhouse in the Netherlands. Berners-Lee says that ‘out-of-season cut flowers emerged as some of the products with the largest carbon footprint per pound generated at [supermarket] tills’. This is before their impact on land use, contributing to deforestation.
What to do?
Perhaps you might encourage your circle of influence to choose green alternatives to red roses when celebrating Valentine's Day, making their gifting sustainable as well as thoughtful.
Find out more about sustainable flower gifts and sustainable church flowers.