- For Valentine’s, brighten up someone’s day! Give them the gift of local flowers.
- Most of the cut flowers that we find at grocery stores are flown in from miles away, creating a giant carbon footprint.
- When we buy locally from farmers and growers in the Bay area, we reduce the negative environmental impact of importing flowers.
- Next time you go to your local florist or farmers market, ask them what flowers are local, or better yet, make your own bouquet from your surroundings.
Local flower resource: www.marinflora.com
Flowers, considered an expression of love, have an ugly side most consumers don’t know about. There are an estimated 40,000 flower workers in Ecuador, and more than 100,000 in Colombia, working to grow, harvest, and package flowers and carnations for North Americans. Flower workers are routinely prevented from organizing unions, experience sexual harassment, forced pregnancy testing, and numerous health and safety violations according to the International Labor Rights Forum.
Flowers are one of the top pesticide-intensive agricultural crops. The Green Book estimates if all the roses purchased for Valentine’s Day in the USA were organically grown, it would prevent the use of 22,700 pounds of pesticides. A joint report between US Labor Education in the Americans and the International Labor Rights Fund found flower companies in Ecuador use more than 30 different chemicals, in addition to fertilizers, in the production of their cut flowers. The report also indicated flower workers experience higher-than-average rates of premature births, congenital malformations and miscarriages. This is in addition to inordinately high incidents of headaches, asthma attacks, frequent colds, vomiting and weight loss. In some areas more than 50% of flower workers have symptoms of pesticide poisoning.
In every area where industrial flower growing takes place, the environmental impact is evidenced through loss of animal and plant species, water resources running out and high levels of deadly chemicals leaching into local water and the surrounding land. In addition to worker’s health concerns and the environmental impact of purchasing non-organic flowers, greenhouse gases produced from the transportation of cut flowers need to be taken into consideration as part of the environmental costs of purchasing flowers for Valentine’s Day. UPS, a North American courier and freight company, shipped more than 14.8 million stems of fresh cut flowers to North America from various South American countries in 2005. From Kenya to Holland to Columbia, the flower industry is having deadly repercussions for the environment.
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