The hidden environmental cost of Valentine’s Day roses

Flowers are perhaps the easiest Valentine’s Day gift to give. They’re cheaper than jewelry and healthier than chocolates. If you plan ahead, you can give your sweetheart a nice bouquet from a florist, or maybe one of those creepy bears made of roses for rose day that are all over Instagram. If you’re not much of a planner, you can pick up a less-nice-but-still-very-fine arrangement from a grocery store the day of; flowers don’t require a ton of effort to get, even if you wait until the very last minute. But the ubiquity and accessibility of Valentine’s Day flowers obscure the long, complex journey they have to take from the greenhouse to your house, and the environmental costs that add up along the way.

American shoppers are expected to spend nearly $2 billion on flowers — most of which will be roses — this Valentine’s Day. Almost all of these valentine day roses will have been flown in from Latin America, specifically the sunny, mountainous regions of Colombia and Ecuador, the world’s second- and third-largest exporters of cut flowers after the Netherlands. Colombia alone shipped more than 4 billion flowers to the US last year, according to the Washington Post. Valentine’s Day makes up more than one-fifth of the country’s rose growers’ annual revenue.

Climate certainly plays a role in the Andean nations’ dominance. Even California, the leading producer of domestic roses for valentine day, isn’t always warm enough to produce the volume of roses shoppers have come to expect around Valentine’s Day. But climatic differences don’t tell the whole story. There’s the fact that labor costs are much lower in Colombia and Ecuador. And, as the Post points out, there’s also the fact that both countries’ floriculture industries have benefited from a longstanding trade agreement with the US that was originally intended to give Andean farmers viable alternatives to coca, the plant used to make cocaine.

In 1991, at the height of Colombia’s war against cartel boss Pablo Escobar, Congress passed the Andean Trade Preference Act, which lifted duties on certain imports from Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. The Andean flower industry began to bloom, crowding out domestic growers who found it difficult to compete with their Andean counterparts who could produce flowers not only more cheaply but also year-round.


When we talk about flowers and sustainability, the biggest issue is how flowers get from their point of origin to retailers across the country. During most of the year, flowers are shipped on passenger planes, Amy Stewart, an investigative reporter and author of the 2007 book Flower Confidential, told me. “They’re put on planes that are going anyway.” But hundreds of cargo planes full of flowers fly from the Andes to Miami in the month before Valentine’s Day. According to the Post, 30 cargo jets fly from Colombia to Miami every day in the three weeks leading up to the big day and a similar amount fly out from Ecuador, amounting to more than 15,000 tons of flowers delivered in less than a month.

These flights have important consequences for the rest of the planet. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, comprising 28 percent of the country’s total emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Just over a quarter of US transportation emissions come from freight over air, land, and sea. Growing aviation demand, for both passengers and cargo, helped fuel an increase in emissions in the United States last year, reversing years of decline. This is significant, as greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane trap heat in the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. Demand for roses isn’t solely to blame for this crisis, but the transportation network needed to bring delicate blossoms across oceans has an outsized environmental footprint. The International Council on Clean Transportation crunched the numbers last year and estimated that those three weeks of flower delivery flights burn approximately 114 million liters of fuel, emitting approximately 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

source - https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/12/18220984/valentines-day-flowers-roses-environmental-effects