Chemicals and flowers: why I choose to only use British grown cut flowers
Our flowers are grown without chemical fertilisers, pesticides or preservatives and this isn’t normal. There are many risks to a flower harvest and chemical applications are a common way of guaranteeing the crop and the quality. When I was looking into whether I should supplement my own flowers with imported ones I started to do some reading about the cut flower industry. I read Amy Stewart’s Gilding the Lily and lots of articles (usually written around Valentine’s Day) about the problems with imported cut flowers. Being a ‘bloodhound for facts’ I realised that a lot of the facts in all these publications were old. (Martyn said to me the other day ‘Harriet, who actually reads the footnotes?” Me! I do!) My first thought when I saw these dates was ‘how can I trust information that is *so* old?’ Surely they’re out of date by now... So I started to look for more recent research and I delved a little deeper and found articles written between 2016 and 2019 that looked at the risk to florists of pesticides found on cut flowers here in Europe. That was the point I decided I didn’t want to use those flowers.
In the UK in 2019 cut flower and ornamental plant sales totalled £1.3billion and 90% of these were imported. Cut flowers are now grown globally and flown here. The countries that grow and export the most are the Netherlands, Ecuador, Columbia, Kenya and Ethiopia. 80% of our imported flowers come via the Netherlands (where they hold the big flower auctions) but 20% are now flown to us direct from Kenya etc. Within the EU there are strict rules on chemical applications but where the crops form a large and essential part of developing countries GDP this is not necessarily the case. (For example cut flowers exports make up 1% of Kenya’s GDP. All these facts are summarised nicely in this BBC article (and showcases a Kenyan fair trade rose farm that’s definitely striving to do things well).
So why are these chemicals so bad?
And that is a very fair point. We know from huge press coverage about the decline in pollinators that some pesticides indirectly but indiscriminately poison insects with a very detrimental impact on the ecosystem that our own food production relies upon (you can read more on this here). When our food supply chain is also increasingly reliant on imported food, global use of these neonicotinoides is just as important as the fields down the road.
But actually it wasn’t the environmental impact that freaked me out and put me off using imported flowers. The use of chemical pesticides poses a risk to everybody in the supply chain but particularly those who have longterm ‘dermal exposure’. That means those people who handle the sprays and the flowers often. Like florists.
The science that made the decision for me was led by Professor Khaoula Toumi at the University of Liege and published between 2016 and 2019:
Pesticide Residues on Three Cut Flower Species and Potential Exposure of Florists in Belgium (2016)
Biological monitoring of exposure to pesticide residues among Belgian florists (2019)
The scientists carried out the work independently - not paid for by any large corporation - and the results are shocking. They asked 20 volunteer florists to wear gloves for 2-3 hours a day, working with the flowers they ‘normally’ use from their wholesalers, and they then took the gloves to the lab and traced the chemicals found on the gloves. There were over 107 different chemicals found! The chemicals found included insecticides and fungicides that have hazardous chronic effects if you are exposed to them for any duration. Indeed the levels of these chemicals were 1000 times more concentrated than on food stuffs. 1000 times ‘food safe’ usage. In 2019 they tested the urine of a sample of florists (with non-florists tested too as a comparison) and they found 70 different residues of pesticides, averaging 8 per person, clearly showing that these chemicals were being absorbed into the body by the florists.
The chemicals are sprayed onto the plants where it is absorbed, but residue remains and can be absorbed by people who handle the flowers. Touching one flower isn’t a risk but the continued exposure of handling them is risky. These chemicals are not fatal but have chronic life impacting effects like causing neurological damage, infertility and cancer.
The abstracts of the articles are very easy to read. The science in the ‘results’ section (it is published in a science journal for scientists) is hard but enough is understandable from the articles to make me a non-scientist not want to handle these flowers. And even if I were to wear gloves and mitigate the risk ‘to me’ their usage isn’t safely applied and that’s not something I want to support; the poor in those developing countries do not need the additional burden of work that causes infertility, neurological damage or cancer. Ethically it's a no thank you from me. By buying British flowers you can ensure that you have flowers in your home that don’t have an average of 10 chemicals on them.
By buying ours you can ensure they don’t have any.