Three Notch Florals

Let's start with what are the major problems we should look out for.  You may think: "it's flowers, how could they possibly be bad for the environment?"  But the truth is, not only do the flowers themselves cause huge environmental problems, but also the floral and design industry is not just flowers.  It's vases and candles and ribbon and zip ties and fabric and linens and signage and installations mechanics and waste disposal and so much transportation!  Once we know what problems we're looking out for, we can see how every piece of the wedding has the potential to harm or help our Earth.

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Problem 1:  Petroleum-Based Products

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Did you know plastic, floral foam, and (usually) candles are a petroleum-based products?  And we should care about petroleum-based products for a lot of reasons.  It helps to understand how oil and natural gas become a zip tie, a block of floral foam, or a polyester ribbon.  But I am going to save that for a separate post because it is a complicated mess that is bad for our planet at every single stage.  Here, I'm just going to highlight at a high level the problems caused by petroleum-based products.

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1)  How we get create the product.  An enormous amount of energy is spent in drilling, fracking, distilling the oil/gas, and the chemical processes to turn hydrocarbons into various products.  The energy required for these processes isn't using solar powers (wouldn't that be ironic if they were!), so lots CO2 is released in the creation of petroleum products.

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2)  How we dispose of the product.  Petroleum-based products are very often non-recyclable (or just not recycled) and non-biodegradable.  As a result, a piece of non-recycled product usually has 4 potential endings — an incinerator, a landfill, a waterway/ocean, or a loose piece of garbage on the ground. 

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• In an incinerator, plastic in particular releases extremely harmful toxic gases and good ole CO2.  Modern waste-to-energy plants do have powerful scrubber technology to capture the toxic gases, but burning plastics outside of these situations (like perhaps when our landfill trash is sent to other countries...) is very dangerous. 

• In a landfill, the primary issue is space (where are we storing all this trash that doesn't biodegrade) and toxic leaching.  Depending on the product (like the types of plastics used to make water bottles or floral foam blocks), there can be toxic chemicals or substances that leach into our soil and waterways as these products degrade. 

• In the water and as loose trash, petroleum products are consumed by wildlife and, increasingly, by us.  This issue is worse than we originally imagined because of our relatively new understanding about microplastic...  

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4)  How the product persists.  Notice how I said that plastics degrade but they do not biodegrade?  This is an important distinction.  When a substance biodegrades, microorganisms reduce it to its constituent parts that can then be reabsorbed by plant life.  But microorganisms responsible for this process do not eat the synthetic products made from petroleum.  The sun and heat will break plastics apart into smaller pieces but not into their base elements (except at very high temperatures in an incinerator).  Translation: these products will break into smaller and smaller pieces, but they will not break down back into hydrogen and carbon and whatever other elements have been added.  So in situations where plastic is exposed to a lot of sun, like on the side of the road or the top of the ocean, it will eventually break apart into microplastics, pieces of plastic that are so small we cannot see them with the human eye, which will end up in our water sources or in the tiniest of planktons or bugs, which then end up in bigger animals that we eat, and which end up in us.