Greenwash The Flowers

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Greenwash The Flowers

A place to discover the truth about the flowers you buy and to change bad practice through education and problem solving.
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12/03/2023

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Someone sent me latest reel this morning and added a 🤮 emoji.
I was already aware of Tomas and his self-styled ‘Europe’s most famous floral designer’ label, but it’s impossible to accuse him of greenwashing.
Tomas uses floral foam by the tonne to construct gigantic shapes; he dyes flowers to fit his palette, he’s part of the ‘more is better’ school – but sees nothing wrong in his profligate use of resources.
He does not attempt to greenwash his work, but glories in its excess.
Tomas’s work is sought after and praised; his weddings and events are admired for their wastefulness; his customers demand that their event outshine anything that’s gone before.
Sadly, Tomas isn’t alone. There are far too many event florists happy to pander to clients’ demands without thought of the cost to the planet.
Luxury is judged by how much money has been spent, hedonism rules and quiet elegance is forgotten.
Where do we start?
Images from

11/03/2023

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The latest YouGov global study on Environmental Marketing revealed that 71% of people in the UK agreed with the statement,
“I am sceptical about most brands’ attempts to convince me that they are green”.
With just one week to Mothering Sunday, the busiest day of the year for giving flowers, we’ll see so many online flower delivery companies making unlikely claims about the sustainability of the flowers they’re offering.
Remember, there are no UK-grown Roses blooming in March.
Every Rose, Gerbera, Lisianthus and Carnation in those bouquets have been imported and any positive environmental claim by the company selling them must be treated with suspicion.
If only 29% of the population swallow the claims anyway, wouldn’t the firms’ monies spent on hiding massive carbon footprints be better spent on working to reduce them?
If you’re trying to be kinder to the planet this Mothers’ Day, buy Daffodils or buy your Mum a gift voucher that can be used later in the year when the weather allows a much greater range of British flowers to be available.

05/03/2023

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The article about online flower delivery companies (see yesterday’s post) gave legitimacy to firms making spurious claims about their flowers.
statement that ‘most of their flowers are home-grown’ is repeated unchallenged where just a few minutes perusal of the images on their website would have shown this to be highly unlikely.
are labelled ‘genuinely sustainable and ethical’. I do not believe any company importing flowers can be called genuinely sustainable and, as Arena win their ethical award by paying for accreditation from The (un)Ethical Company Organisation, the praise can be ignored.
Throughout their copy-and-paste article, Astill and Lewis carp about the cost of the bouquets, ‘Prices are a little high”, ‘Luxury bouquets are very expensive’, culminating in their bald comment about Floward’s service, “It’s not cheap”.
You honestly want flowers grown under acres of plastic, watered, cut, refrigerated and flown 5,000 miles to be cheap too? The planet you live on is only worth destroying provided it’s done cheaply?j.astill if you’re interested in doing original research about the honest environmental cost of the flowers on sale on 19th March please get in touch.
(Image from Arena Flowers)

04/03/2023

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A recent piece in The Telegraph reviewed their favourite online flower delivery companies in preparation for Mothers’ Day.
Lazy journalists simply copied the firms’ own claims on their websites with no effort to check the truth.

It’s another type of greenwashing: like a crooked dealer laundering dirty money, this sort of article in a respected newspaper gives credence to dodgy claims. Why should firms worry about veracity about their products when they can be pretty sure that gullible journalists will lap up their propaganda?

Happily, the Telegraph placed The Great British Florist in first place for providing the only genuinely seasonal British-grown bouquet they reviewed - but, even then, they found fault with the relatively small choice of flowers on offer. Er… you bought locally-grown flowers in Britain in February, have you looked out of the window?
As for the other online delivery companies they reviewed, I’ll continue tomorrow…

Genuinely seasonal, honest flowers for Mothering Sunday can be found by searching www.flowersfromthefarm.co.uk

03/12/2022

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The catastrophic drought affecting the area around London and the Home Counties has worsened, say experts.
With little rain having fallen for four years, whole regions of Scotland and the South East have been declared an emergency zone and livestock have died in their millions. Starving people are leaving their homes and trekking miles to relief centres, which are themselves short of food and water because of the civil war in the Hebrides.
Much of the Midlands, the whole of East Anglia and much of the Borders are already in crisis and Worldwide charities are warning that millions in the UK will die without immediate aid.

In other news, our world-famous Rose farms in Snowdonia continue to export between 3 and 4 million stems of roses every day to the Ethiopian market and the same area is busy harvesting thousands of tonnes of green beans, sugarsnap peas, baby leeks, asparagus, mangetout and baby sweet corn for East Africa’s dinner tables.

Looks different when you swap a few names on a map doesn’t it?

I’ve superimposed the UK map onto that of drought-ridden Ethiopia at exactly the same scale, so my comparison of distances is genuine.

Now tell me you’re still happy importing 50,000 roses for your one-day luxury event.

19/11/2022

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A few weeks ago I complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about Prestige Flowers] describing themselves as organic and single-use plastic free.
The ASA rejected my complaint as they deemed I was a competitor of Prestige 🙄.
Not to be put off, I inveigled my lovely niece into making a similar complaint (which is why I ordered those plastic-wrapped neon Chrysanthemums from Prestige a few weeks back) and yesterday she got a reply.
The ASA are currently looking into how they respond to matters of an environmental nature, so they cannot take up her complaint at this time…..
Great to hear they’re launching a Climate Change & Environment Project but sad that, in the meantime, customers will continue to be duped by Prestige Flowers] and other online flower delivery companies into believing they’re buying an eco-friendly product.

13/11/2022

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A FOAM-FREE FUTURE?
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When floral foam is banned, what will happen?
Will families suddenly decide not to have flowers at their loved one’s funerals?
No. The demand will remain constant.
Funeral Directors .uk will need to liaise with florists about a whole new range of designs and practices.
New mechanics will have to be worked out and new pricing bands introduced to take account of the extra work/time involved.. and this would be the same for EVERY florist: no-one would lose out because every single florist would be in the same position.
At present, we have a two-tier situation with traditional foam-users feeling threatened by the upsurge in users. It can make for poor relations among florists when we should be a united team.
Will a ban on floral foam actually make for better relationships?

12/11/2022

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A FOAM-FREE FUTURE?
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Stopping using floral foam was very easy for me. I’m a one-woman band, a sole trader with no-one dictating how my flowers should be arranged.
It’s not as easy for everyone.
Some of a florist’s business will involve delivering arrangements to customers that have been ordered through a relay company such as
The rise in online delivery companies like has eaten into this sector, but the orders are still coming in and the florist is required to clone a specified design - again based on floral foam.
The companies taking customers’ orders need to update their designs to let florists work more sustainably.
COP27 is making us all think about how we can work and live without further damaging the planet.

11/11/2022

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A FOAM-FREE FUTURE?
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One day in the not-too-distant future, floral foam will be banned.
For many, that day can’t come soon enough, but I recognise it’s scary for many florists who believe they can’t run their business without it.
Most of a high street florist’s business can be funeral work; the orders coming straight from the funeral director with no contact with the bereaved’s family. 80% of this work features the same common designs, all based on floral foam - so it’s not surprising many florists believe their business depends on it.
COP27 can make us think we individuals are powerless to help the environment crisis but, if you’re trying to change the way you do farewell flowers, you’ll find inspiration and every little helps.

10/11/2022

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If you only do one thing…
If stopping using floral foam altogether is still a step too far:-
If, despite knowing the damage it does, you worry your business won’t survive without it:-
If you only do one thing, stop pouring the water in which you’ve soaked it, down the drain.
That water is now brim full of micro plastics and, whether you pour it down the sink, down a gully in the street or down the toilet it’ll end up in the sea and damage further our already fragile oceans.
The ‘best’ place (and I use that phrase with regret) is onto the ground in your own garden.

06/11/2022

We are coming to the end of the British growing season, when genuinely more environmentally friendly options are available to florists in the UK. This is a time when transparency is most crucial as some floristry businesses switch to naturally dried or foliage and branchy options that can be sourced locally grown whilst some choose to use imported flowers.

These are individual choices reflecting individual circumstances but how this is communicated to customers is key to combating greenwashing and spreading misinformation, like the common misconception that dried flowers are better. Naturally dried options are great, unfortunately it is the artificially preserved, bleached and dyed that seem to feature far too often in these so called ‘eco’ designs. So to repeat our main takeaways from the week:

Wholesalers and Suppliers: Label provenance and production processes.

Floristry service providers: Ask questions of your wholesalers and suppliers and label your products and services accordingly. Preference using locally grown and un chemically treated ingredients where possible.

Customers: Ask questions of your floristry service providers and if you can seek out and support businesses that preference using locally grown and un chemically treated ingredients where possible.

Thanks so much for having us this week and for all your comments and shares. For more from us, follow us on .collective.
The truth is, we are so passionate about raising awareness of issues such as those we have discussed this week that for 2023 we’ll be focusing much more on SSAW as a content and campaigning platform. Be sure to look out for our winter campaign ‘Why Buy Roses in February?’ which we will be launching soon too. Check out our journal post to find out more in the meantime: https://www.ssawcollective.com/post/why-buy-roses-in-february
📷 &

06/11/2022

We wanted to round up our posts for the week over here by sharing some of the processes we have tried to put in place to create a business and customer service model that is honest, professional and sticking to our core values.

If you work in floriculture and can relate to the topics we have touched on in our posts over the past week and you have felt frustrated by the status quo like us, these might be useful to try if you haven’t already. Many we are sure are already well put into practice. Please do comment with anymore you have to add:

Familiarise yourselves with the availability lists of local growers and ideally buy from them as much as possible. Supporting the existence of these growers is vital to creating the existence of a viable alternative to the current system. Check out to find growers near you.

Ask them about their growing practices, many small market flower farms in the UK grow chemical free, outdoors and in unheated greenhouses or are working really hard to improve their production processes - it’s a great pleasure getting to know the grower’s story and forming close relationships is often mutually beneficial.

As a handy reference, Claire Brown of , who hosted the account recently, has written a guide to the availability of seasonal flowers in the UK, aptly named ‘The British Flowers Book’.

Ask your wholesalers where the flowers you are buying are from. Look out for certifications and standards.

Be honest about where the flowers you are using have come from and if you are using a mixture of imported and local be up front about it, make sure hashtags and descriptions are clear. As said, ‘there is no shame in using imports - only deceit in pretending that you don’t.’

Be fair to your industry colleagues, calling others out is not always a productive exercise. Having a conversation with them about something that you feel might be helpful for both parties to unpick, is more likely to lead to positive change. We can only do this together. In order to build a better floriculture industry we’ve got to still have an industry to be able to improve.

Continued in comments…

04/11/2022

Greenwashing is characterised by nebulous language and unsubstantiated claims in relation to eco credentials. Take for example the word ‘seasonal’: Having started our careers working in florist shops we know that customers often ask for a ‘seasonal’ bunch. It is also often used as a descriptor to market a bouquet but when the global floriculture system doesn’t operate in a seasonal way and, bar a very few exceptions, many flowers are available all year round, a ‘seasonal’ bunch is often not at all in tune to local seasonality.

As growers who are more familiar with the seasons we experience in our plots, we know how to recognise a truly seasonal bunch but many consumers don’t and trust the expertise of their floristry professional. The trouble here is how disconnected to growing in harmony with nature and a relationship to locality, floristry has become. Many florists’ understanding of “in-season” is derived from the availability at a wholesalers rather than what is actually available locally grown to them and would therefore relevantly be considered ‘seasonal’.

This blurred seasonality wouldn’t necessarily be a problem in itself (if it weren’t for all the environmental issues that growing in this way does cause) but the trouble is that by association the word ‘seasonal’ references something that you would think would be growing naturally and easily, and a customer can think they are making a better choice and protecting the environment.

‘Seasonal’ isn’t even a word particularly linked with being environmentally friendly, but that’s how pervasive these issues of greenwashing are, a customer might not even be able to trust a claim as simple as ‘seasonal’. Then there are the real misleading terms like ‘biodegradable’ for packaging and floral foam and phrases like ‘sustainable’ and ‘straight from the grower’ which other posts on here have already unpacked, quite frankly spreading misinformation.

So what can we do about it? Continued in comments…

03/11/2022

Yesterday we focused on labelling at a growing and wholesale level, over the next few days we are going to be focusing on labelling as floristry service providers.

The old adage might be that ‘actions speak louder than words’ but the truth is, words do matter when it comes to marketing. Nebulous language and unsubstantiated claims are used all too often nowadays which is confusing not only for customers but also for all floral businesses who are genuinely true to their environmental policy.

A recent international analysis of websites by the the Competition and Markets Authority found that 40% of green claims made online could be misleading.

In order to try and prevent this has created a Green Claims Code. The proposed guidance sets out 6 principles that environmental claims should follow:

1. Be truthful and accurate: Businesses must live up to the claims they make about their products, services, brands and activities
2. Be clear and unambiguous: The meaning that a consumer is likely to take from a product’s messaging and the credentials of that product should match
3. Not omit or hide important information: Claims must not prevent someone from making an informed choice because of the information they leave out
4. Only make fair and meaningful comparisons: Any products compared should meet the same needs or be intended for the same purpose
5. Consider the full life cycle of the product: When making claims, businesses must consider the total impact of a product or service. Claims can be misleading where they don’t reflect the overall impact or where they focus on one aspect of it but not another
6. Be substantiated: Businesses should be able to back up their claims with robust, credible and up to date evidence.

Tomorrow, we’ll get down to what this means in practice and how it might affect or influence a business?

02/11/2022

At .collective, we think a good place to start in helping to eliminate the opacity that allows greenwashing to occur, would be with better labelling legislation. It would make a huge difference if sufficient labelling detailing provenance and production processes and ideally welfare standards and working condition certifications had to be provided at every stage of the supply chain. This information is worryingly difficult to come by for industry professionals let alone the public.

We also think there is great potential for major behavioural change if the labelling, much like food labelling nowadays, included specific guides on seasonality and of realistic vase life too so the expectations of flowers from florists could be returned to something more natural that actually resembled the seasons we see around us.

From the reading we have done so far, we think that working within the global floriculture system to change these expectations could take the pressure off flower farms to grow crops all year round and instead focus on cultivating specific crops suited to the actual climates of their locations. This would help to reduce the need for high input operations and thus the high impacts on the environment and might even encourage the development of more holistic working practices and better working conditions.

What we aren’t clear on yet, is practically how to go about campaigning to make this labelling a reality. We actively want to participate in encouraging policy change here. There are without doubt a wealth of incredible minds following this account and within its networks, with all sorts of different areas of expertise and existing knowledge, we are certain that much work must be being done on this already.

We are moving in the direction of increasing our advocacy work and want to offer up our time and energy to make this happen and more accessible to those like us who want to be involved or to proactively show their support. If you have any ideas/insight into how we can do this, please let us know. We are all ears.

01/11/2022

For us at .collective there are two potential causes of greenwashing. First, the unintentional assumptions that can arise due to lack of real understanding within the industry about the impacts of certain choices, meaning the language with which a product is marketed is unclear. Second, there is the intentional misleading of customers. At a time when we know many people genuinely want to buy ‘better’, to us deliberate greenwashing couldn’t feel more criminal.

Yet as previous posts on this account have so well expressed, legislative action still doesn’t seem to be working so it’s vital that accounts like this one continue to raise awareness and empower consumers with the knowledge to recognise it.

Unfortunately, in floristry, the water is often muddied right from the outset as consumers associate flowers with nature. The truth as is becoming more widely known couldn’t be more different: the global floriculture industry as it currently operates on a mass scale is not natural and it is certainly not protecting the environment or many of the people that make up its workforce.

High water usage, pesticides, chemical run off, carbon footprint, are serious impacts affecting the planet and that is before we even get started on the social injustices affecting people which we believe are intrinsic to any discussion about green issues.

This is not a post advocating boycotting imported blooms. We know this would undoubtedly be devastating for economies that rely on it as a major source of income. It is a post saying that we do not need to accept the current status quo and to acknowledge that change is imperative. Until it does, the average floristry business shouldn’t claim to be environmentally friendly - it simply cannot be if it operates within the parameters of the current system.

This is not to say that steps aren’t being taken, that efforts aren’t being made by many florists and flower growers but today this basic reality is a truth that needs to be faced up to by all of us working within the industry. We need to be upfront about it and do more to ensure that customers have the information and confidence to recognise and challenge brands stating otherwise.

31/10/2022

Hello, we are and from .collective and we are taking over hosting this week.

We first met as freelance florists working on events where much attention was paid to the provenance and seasonality of the food but not at all to the flowers which shared the same table. We had both become increasingly concerned with the negative impacts of the global floriculture system and had started growing our own, we joined forces and together with chef , SSAW was born. A community of chefs, florists and growers all committed to an ethical way of working with seasonal produce, to try and challenge this disconnect between food, flowers and farming.

Thanks to the hard work and dedication of the UK food and farming community, we have become much more accustomed to thinking about the provenance of the food we consume, who grew or raised it, and how they did it. There has been great attention drawn to the crippling effects of mass mono-culture food farming on our environment and our soils. Yet so far, scrutiny on the same scale has not been given to the floriculture industry.

We both made commitments to working only with British grown flowers, mostly those we grow ourselves or from other small market farms as we felt this was the simplest way to have as much clarity as possible in the ethical and ecological credentials of the supply chains for our work. It is much easier to trace growing conditions with flowers grown in the UK, where worker rights, wages and pesticide usage are more regulated.

However, for us, advocating for positive change in the flower growing industry in the UK comes not only with the responsibility for the flowers we use ourselves but to help consumers make more informed choices about the flowers they’re buying wherever they are from, which is where our particular interest in the issues of greenwashing comes about.

Our approach is always intended to encourage conversation rather than criticise or call out so we are pleased to be part of discussion here. This week we are going to be covering some of the issues that we are facing in our own practice as we try to support consumers in making more informed choices.

29/10/2022

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Following on the discussion about this regularly made claim, what does “Straight from the grower?” really mean?
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Flamingo Group International Ltd, for instance, farm flowers on 1,300 hectares in Kenya and Ethiopia, growing 1.5 billion stems per year for their own direct marketing businesses.
They grow the flowers, they export them, they bunch them in their own packing houses straight into boxes that are already branded with, say, Bloom & Wild’s logo and they arrange delivery straight to the customer’s door.
Flamingo own and manage the whole process with ultra-efficiency and B&W need never see nor lay a finger on the flowers themselves.
Thus Flamingo enable to claim they deliver flowers ‘straight from the grower’ because no other company has been involved in the process.
(If we gullible customers choose to put our own idyllic, parochial interpretation on these words, it’s our own lookout)
It’s a fast, reliable, efficient service by Flamingo: it’s good for the customer to get fresher produce: good for B&W’s image.
Is it also good for the environment? 🤔

27/10/2022

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What does ‘Straight from the grower’ actually mean?”
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So many online flower distributors make this seductive claim: it conjures up an image of a farmer over in the next field snipping a few special blooms with you, the customer, in mind and then dropping them off at the parcel depot in a rusty truck.
Well, it’s not exactly like that.
The claims are true, but in a totally different way from your wistful image.
It’s called Vertical Integration and it’s Big Business
Back in the day, a flower grower in the UK might have sent his flowers up to Covent Garden Market to be sold. There, a wholesaler with a van might have bought them.
The wholesaler would hawk them around florist shops and you, the customer, would buy them from the florist.
Modern methods have dramatically simplified a complex supply chain and the customer receives a much fresher product - averaging just 72 hours to deliver from a farm in East Africa to their own doorstep.
to be continued...

26/10/2022

“Should any flower imported by air be labelled Sustainable?”
Discuss…

25/10/2022

. I used to be proud to describe my flowers as sustainable.
Back in the day, not many people used the word and those flower farmers that did, were referring to their locally-grown, seasonal, pesticide-free flowers.
Now that everything from loo brushes to air travel claim to be sustainable, the word is treated too lightly, devalued, discredited -should I move on?
To what?
When the correct description’s been hijacked what can you say instead?

22/10/2022

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When I first found out about imported Roses being treated with preservatives before their long journey, I think I imagined their stems being dipped in an inch or two of liquid.
I certainly hadn’t bargained for the whole flower heads being dunked in a vat of some chemical.
I’m so relieved to see the local workers at this Kenyan grower wearing full protective gear and facemasks.
I trust you wear the same when you receive them in a bouquet?

?

30/09/2022

This is the reason that it's so vitally important we raise awareness, point out the untruths, & lead by example.

I'd like to refer you to a study from May 2017 in Belgium on a group of 20 florists - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316948332_Risk_Assessment_of_Florists_Exposed_to_Pesticide_Residues_through_Handling_of_Flowers_and_Preparing_Bouquets?fbclid=IwAR1j2FBfSkExjkHjiJfzyrSUK3uRbMBvJdS5umqde6hDZKgMh-0_PREe8CQ

Each florist wore gloves while working a max of 3 hours per day. When these gloves were analysed there were 111 active substances (mainly insecticides & fungicides) detected. The images above list chemicals that were consistently found on the gloves with an explanation of the potential impact on human health.
How many florists actually wear gloves while consistently day in, day out handling these flowers?

How many of us have worked completely obliviously with imported flowers in the past, drank cups of tea & laughed when we fished out leaves & stems of the roses we had stood & stripped & continued to drink it?
How many of us have eaten our sandwich with the same unwashed hands that are handling those imported flowers?
How many of us have rubbed our eyes between collecting flowers for a bouquet?
How many of us ladies have been pregnant or breast feeding or even trying for a baby while working for hours on end with imported flowers?
Would we have done this if we had known that these flowers had been treated with a toxic cocktail of chemicals?
Would we have continued to use these flowers if we had known just how these chemicals could potentially affect our physical health or the health of our children?
Would the general public be happy to know that the impact on their health could be affected by handling the flowers that they have been lovingly gifted?

This is why I am so passionate about this group.
These chemicals are the reason why not only for the environment but for people's health that handle them. This is the reason that it's not acceptable to be using or when clearly they are not. It's not only bending the truth, it's putting people's health at risk & that is not acceptable!

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