Why ‘low carbon’ roses are flown around the world

AS you read this, planes full of roses are heading from east Africa and South America to almost every corner of the world. If you buy someone a rose this Valentine’s Day, it may be in the air right now or perhaps in a refrigerated warehouse in the Netherlands.

A huge logistical operation ensures those flowers are timed to be perfectly in bloom on the 14th. From flower farm to bouquet can take just a few days. In all, hundreds of millions of roses will be shipped internationally this week, and many will die before they can be sold.

Can all this flying be justified?

Many people don’t realise just how far a Valentine’s rose has probably travelled. Though roses can be grown in the UK (and some species are native), most of them won’t flower for at least another few months.

Jill Timms and David Bek, academics at the University of Coventry who have researched the global flower trade point out: “This sort of localised growing does not satisfy the demand for volume, variety and year-round supply, or indeed guarantee sustainability in terms of energy, pesticide use and so on.”

This means most roses are imported from countries with more land, more sunshine, and a cheaper workforce. Major growers include Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya and Ethiopia. The Netherlands is actually the biggest exporter of roses, partly due to its own production in greenhouses but mostly thanks to its position as a crucial hub for the global trade. Flowers sent to the UK from the Netherlands were probably grown elsewhere.

To ensure they stay fresh, those flowers are kept cool as they’re transported in a series of refrigerated lorries, planes or boats, while some are sprayed with chemicals to freeze them.

“Geography matters,” say Timms and Bek. “Some flowers travel by sea, some cargo plane and others in the hold of passenger jets, all with very different carbon footprints.”

Figuring out a flower’s carbon footprint is not straightforward. Jennifer Lavers and Fiona Kerslake from the University of Tasmania compared cut flowers grown in heated or refrigerated greenhouses in the Netherlands with those grown in Kenya.

“Maintaining the controlled environmental conditions inside these [Dutch] buildings requires artificial light, heat and cooling, so each rose grown in The Netherlands contributes an average of around 2.91kg of CO₂ to the atmosphere.”

“In contrast”, they write, “a single rose grown on a farm in Kenya contributes only 0.5kg. This is largely because Kenyan hot houses do not use artificial heating or lighting, and most farm workers walk or cycle to work. As a result, flowers grown in tropical regions are sometimes considered low-carbon (of course, this doesn’t always factor in international transport).”

Paul D. Larson of the University of Manitoba points out that, while local production would ground some of the international flower flights, “growing flowers in greenhouses can use as much energy as shipping them [to North America] from Colombia by air freight”.

Larson, a professor of supply chain management, does highlight one major issue with “low carbon” flowers in the global south, however:

“Since flowers are not classified as edible, they are often exempt from pesticide regulations. Thus, many flower production workers in Ecuador and Colombia have suffered from respiratory problems, rashes and eye infections caused by exposure to toxic chemicals in fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides.”

The flower trade in Ecuador and Colombia was actually engineered a few decades ago to try and stem the flow of cocaine into the US, says Jay L. Zagorsky, an associate professor at Boston University’s business school.

“One part of the strategy was to convince farmers in Colombia to stop growing coca leaves – a traditional Andean plant that provides the raw ingredient for making cocaine – by giving them preferential access to US markets if they grew something else.”

Whether this policy helped stop drug production is unclear, says Zagorsky, but American domestic rose growing has collapsed and “many businesses in Colombia and Ecuador started growing and shipping flowers north”.

No one expects you to know exactly how a flower was grown, what conditions were like for workers, or to conduct a full “life cycle assessment” of their carbon footprint. But what can you do to help this Valentine’s Day?

Timms and Bek, the flower trade experts at Coventry University, wrote about five ways to ensure your flowers are ethical. They contrast flowers grown in the Netherlands and Kenya and say that “your priorities need to guide your purchase: environmental issues include carbon footprint, chemical use, ecological degradation and water use; social issues include health and safety standards, gender discrimination, precarious employment and land rights.”

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This article is republished from The Conversation via Reuters Connect

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