Sustainability experts at BusinessWaste.co.uk have calculated that every year the plastic waste generated from Valentine’s Day flowers reaches 500,000m2. Each year four million bouquets of flowers are bought for loved ones, but as each bouquet often comes wrapped in a plastic sleeve, this contributes to a disheartening amount of plastic waste.
Most bouquet sleeves are made specifically from clear polypropylene film. This material can be recycled, but it’s unlikely customers’ local collection services will take it, which means they can’t put it in their household recycling bins.
Each bunch of flowers also often comes with one or two sachets of food in a plastic container, which further adds to plastic waste. Rubber bands usually hold each bouquet together, potentially adding four million rubber bands to landfill every Valentine’s Day.
Rubber bands take up to 50 years to biodegrade and can be incredibly harmful to the environment. If burned they release carcinogenic pollution into the atmosphere. Rubber bands can be dangerous for wildlife too, causing them to become tangled up and injured, or even eat them and die.
How can we reduce bouquet waste this Valentine’s Day?
- Choose sustainable packaging - Consider providing flower bouquets wrapped in paper or compostable tissue or look for biodegradable options.
- Offer a take back scheme - With most bouquet sleeves hard for customers to recycle at home, consider providing a scheme where consumers can bring plastic packaging back to you to recycle.
- Ditch the flower food sachets - Either swap plastic food sachets to dry food in paper sachets, or consider dropping them altogether and providing tips to make plant food at home instead.
- Swap out rubber bands - Consider using string or ribbon to hold together bouquets as opposed to rubber bands and encouraging consumers to reuse them.
What other waste is generated each Valentine’s Day?
- 25 million Valentine’s cards are sent and (most) disposed of in the UK annually
- It’s estimated that 13,500 miles of wrapping paper are used for Valentine’s gifts in the UK
- More than 17,000 tonnes of cardboard packaging waste is created on February 14th across the UK – from chocolate boxes and delivery boxes for online gift orders
- The UK creates nearly 7,500 tonnes of plastic packaging for Valentine’s gifts
- Just over one in five (22%) Brits claim they don’t buy gifts – and thus create no extra waste on Valentine’s Day
Methodology:
- The common flower bouquet sleeve size is 60 cm (length) x 30 cm (top width) x 15 cm (bottom width)
- This gives an average width of (30 cm + 15 cm) / 2 = 22.5 cm
- The surface area can be calculated as: 22.5 cm x 60 cm = 1,350 cm²
- In metres this is 0.135 m²
- 4,000,000 million flower bouquets are sold in the UK every Valentine’s Day according to https://www.export.org.uk/insights/trade-news/valentine-s-day-bouquets-delayed-as-traders-grapple-with-new-border-system/
- Therefore 0.135 (metres^2) x 4 000 000 = 540,000 m2
About BusinessWaste.co.uk: We’re a leading waste broker in the UK that helps businesses with all their commercial waste needs. At Business Waste, we deliver reliable waste collection and waste disposal services to organisations across all industries and keep as much rubbish away from landfill as possible