A sustainably sourced flower is a fresh cut flower that is not treated with pesticides and can be found, grown, and sold locally, it’s also wrapped in paper or other ecofriendly material and hasn’t been treated with pesticides. Your best bet to get one is your own garden or the local farm.
What is unsustainable about fresh flowers is their short life and all the energy required to prolong their life while often transporting from one part of the world to the other. If you want to be very nitpicky, you can add the amount of land needed to farm flowers, the greenhouses and their upkeep.
Obviously no solution is perfect in this world, however what is really cool about paper is the full cycle of its life. So here, a farmer plants and grows trees that are great oxygen producers, the trees are cut down, paper is being produced. The paper is being changed into the flowers, you keep the flowers for as long as you want, they will last years if you keep them away from a strong daylight. Ok but what if you get bored? You can repurpose them as something else like different arrangement, gift topper or a flower crown. You can also recycle them.
I avoid using any hot glue, and don’t use styrofoam or floral foam at all to make that recycling part even easier.
So you only have paper, non toxic water dissolvable glue and wire, which all can be recycled. It means that something else can be made of them now.
If the farmer sees higher demand for trees, they plant more, the more oxygen is being produced. Additionally, the more tree farms we have, the less deforestations should take place.
As we all know, in theory everything sounds great, not so easy to implement all that, isn’t it. Our main focus should be on buying less in general, and to buy long lasting products, not a fast but short lived fashion. There’s a long way ahead of us.
Resources and to find out more:
https://www.popsci.com/environment/paper-products-sustainability/
https://www.greenmatters.com
