How can you get sustainable cut flowers?

Can you get sustainable cut flowers?

All products have an environmental impact and we need to choose wisely when we make our purchases. A natural product such as cut flowers can have a substantially different environmental impact, or carbon footprint, depending on how and where they are grown.

Typically, seasonal flowers grown outdoors with minimal chemicals and artificial fertilisers local to where they are sold, will have a much lower carbon footprint to flowers grown under glass with extra lighting, water and feed that are then flown overseas to market in a chilled container.

At MeadowSweet Posies we grow our own and work with other local growers to use 100% British ingredients. We like local, seasonal flowers, and we don't want to use flowers with a large carbon footprint associated with air miles or packed full of pesticides and grown with artificial fertilisers. We like to team up with other local Flowers from the Farm growers where possible and would love to get involved with local community growing projects.

In contrast, almost all the flowers you see for sale at the supermarkets will have been flown thousands of miles to get here and a typical imported bunch of flowers can have an carbon footprint equivalent to an economy short-haul flight!

We use glass jars for our posies. They look nice, they are made in Britain with >40% recycled content, and they are easy to clean and reuse many times over.

We use unbleached, uncoated, >80% recycled content brown boxes and kraft paper wrapping. We think natural looks best, we can reuse the boxes for local customers, and we don't want to send flowers in packaging that can't be recycled.

We use biocellophane because we always like our flowers to have a drink and biocellophane is better than plastic to hold water or gel.

We use biofilm stickers on our wrapping because they are splash-proof and compostable and an better alternative to plastic-coated stickers. 

For UK deliveries we use Royal Mail Tracked24 service which has, on average, the lowest carbon footprint per delivery of any British courier.

If you'd like to try us out you can send one of our award-winning British-grown, seasonal flower posies to anywhere in the UK, by clicking here.