No — dried flowers are not sustainable products.
April 15, 2023.
Instagram is awash with, well, dried flower greenwashing. Cut flowers are out, and dried flowers are in; but it’s not as if one industry has replaced another.
Instead, the dried flower trend — devoid and blood-drained of its cultural significance — has created another stressor on mother nature. All for a new cheap, tacky statement to make on Instagram or TikTok about how bougie your home is. (Or rather, how planet-killing your home is?)
Commercial and industry scale dried flower production is laden with ecological threats and oddly strong chemical use — but it’s perfectly disguised by the continuing misuse of the word ‘sustainable’.
In case you missed that: most likely no, those dried flowers you bought from the store or online aren’t better for the environment than fresh cut flowers.
Both are as bad as each other — and dried flowers may even be worse. With most dried flowers being:
heat-treated (so, that’s some extra CO2 production we don’t need )
bleached and chemically hardened
coated with water-soluble plastic (which I shouldn't have to tell you is a nightmare for the environment and the ocean), or,
treated with anti-mould chemicals
…the latest fad in home décor is another concoction that humans appear to have come up with that is also eating mother nature alive.
It might even be the case that your dried flowers have literally undergone all four earth-killing procedures to make them: heat treatment, bleaching, anti-mould chemical treatment and water soluble plastic coating.
Another aspect of the dried flower trend is the contribution that commercial and industrial flower growth (and natural flower theft) contributes to freshwater loss, deforestation and natural habitat destruction — due to the forced change in the use of land from natural habitat and ecosystem, to industrial horticulture.
Read more at this link.
