Valentines Day at the coal-face: how flowers fritter our fossil fuels

This post is for the Green Moms Carnival on Coal hosted this month by Retro Housewife Goes Green.

Last year was a typical lead-up to Valentines Day for my uncle, who has a rose farm.  On cooler nights the computer system alerted the coal-fed boiler that the roses needed to be warmed. The boiler automatically fired-up, burned coal and in their greenhouses, the rose bushes were warmed by heated water pipes lying at their feet. 

For the cut-flower industry, Valentines Day is the craziest time of year.  In less than two weeks’ time roses and other cut flowers will be chilled and shipped all around the world, pouring into the airports of developed countries.  There, they will be transported in refrigerated trucks to wholesalers then delivered to over a hundred thousand florists.  By now most of us are aware that the miles associated with imported perishable products like flowers creates a carbon-footprint nightmare.  In the US alone, 9000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions will be produced by the 100 million Valentines roses shipped from the grower to the florist.

So should we only buy locally-grown flowers? Not necessarily. Many people are not aware of the carbon emissions from the production of the flowers themselves which, due to their highly variable nature, are often not calculated.  Many of these emissions come from carbon released from burning fossil fuels like coal.

Because half of US electricity comes from burning coal, the carbon footprint of your roses depends which state they are grown in.  A US cut flower producer in Wyoming, North Dakota, West Virginia or Indiana who has a climate-controlled operation with refrigeration, powered by cheaper coal-burning electricity might as well be shovelling tons of coal into a boiler like my uncle.

In the US, 90% of cut roses are imported from Colombia and Ecuador.  Apart from the fly-miles, the carbon footprint of these roses is not bad. The flowers don’t need to be heated or cooled, the amount of power needed to produce them is low and staff at the rose farms mostly walk or bike to work. Compared to the US or the Netherlands -- the world’s leading flower exporter – South American production is low tech and low-impact.

For much the same reasons, last year the British Government issued a recommendation to the UK public to purchase flowers imported from Kenya for Valentines Day, rather than the Netherlands, after a study showed that Kenyan flowers had a nearly 6 times lower environmental impact than the traditional Dutch flowers.

But what may not have been accounted for in this calculation is that Kenya is heavily reliant on imported fertilizer for growing flowers and if produced in China then it is likely to be made from coal.

There are over 500 coal-based fertilizer plants in China -- the world’s leading manufacturer of fertiliser -- where coal accounts for nearly 70% of the total energy consumption feedstock to produce it.   The resulting fertilizer is generally poor quality and low in nutrient concentration.

The Chinese flower industry itself is an emerging major world player and has ambitious plans to become the biggest flower producer and exporter in Asia in 10 to 15 years and possibly the world’s largest after the Netherlands.  In Los Angeles on Valentines Day 2006, if you searched hard you could find a Chinese-grown rose, packed into a gift box with a bottle of wine. This year, China aims to export more than 200 million roses to the US.   And the main source of power in China, used for production and refrigeration, comes from coal-fired power plants which are projected to satisfy approximately three-fourths of China’s total power generation requirements through to 2030.   The Chinese Government is backing its flower industry growth, investing $20 billion a year in the emerging cut flower area of South West China by building 12-lane highways, bridges and airports.  Growers are receiving interest-free loans to build greenhouses and heavily subsidized, or free refrigerated trucks for transportation.

That’s a lot of money and coal-burning emissions to produce a highly perishable product which, by the time it reaches the other side of the world, may have a vase life of 3 days.

My uncle has decided to ditch the coal and go green.  He aims for his rose farm to become carbon-neutral and is in the process of converting the coal-fired boiler to run on sustainable timber waste.  It hasn’t been painless.  A glitch in the boiler caused a major fire 3 weeks ago which threatened his whole Valentines Day crop.  But it will be wonderful on February 14 when a nervous young account manager about to make his big declaration to the girl in the next office, sends her a bunch of my uncle’s roses which says: “I love you….and the planet”.

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