Bad Floral Foam!!

Happy New Year!! (Unfortunately there are no photos or funny pictures today as the blogger program does not want to load anything...bad blogger!!)

I would like to touch on the subject of New Year’s resolutions. I have been reading and thinking about the benefits of recycling, the environment and the general well being of fauna and flora. With the New Year I finally took action.

We enjoy the beautiful flowers nature gives us, but we do not always return the favour. I have come to realise that we, as florists, have a big responsibility to keep our carbon footprint as small as possible. Without the beautiful flowers nature provides we would be stuck in a tiny grey office on the 25th floor - any florist’s nightmare!

All the products florists use to make the arrangements our clients buy are disposable; it's not something you would keep for a long period of time. Once the flowers die you throw the baskets, plastic wrap, oasis, green florist bowls away. Most of these products end up at the rubbish heap and gets buried at the landfill site. Out of sight, out of mind is how the saying goes. Cape Town, alone, produces 6000tons of waste PER DAY! To put it into perspective, that is 1.7 to 2kg of waste per person per day (1). One ton of waste will fill a 3m x 2m room (to the ceiling) with waste (2).

Floral foam is the product I use to create floral arrangements for table centrepieces, etc. I have always wondered what it is made of and whether or not it is biodegradable. Sadly I learnt that it is not biodegradable. After testing it on rats and rabbits (which breaks my heart), they found it to be harmful to people when exposed to it over long periods of time...like me. (3)

The basic "emergency overview" is that is "may be irritating to eyes, skin, and respiratory tract" (3). Personally I have not experienced any of these symptoms.

It contains the following chemicals (which explains the abovementioned symptoms):

Formaldehyde - Formaldehyde is highly toxic to all animals, regardless of method of intake. Ingestion of as little as 30 ml of a solution containing 37% formaldehyde has been reported to cause death in an adult human. Water solution of formaldehyde is very corrosive and its ingestion can cause severe injury to the upper gastrointestinal tract. At concentrations above 0.1 ppm in air formaldehyde can irritate the eyes and mucous membranes, resulting in watery eyes. Formaldehyde inhaled at this concentration may cause headaches, a burning sensation in the throat, and difficulty breathing, and can trigger or aggravate asthma symptoms (4).

Barium Sulphates - Although soluble salts of barium are moderately toxic to humans, barium sulphate is nontoxic due to its insolubility. The most common means of inadvertent barium poisoning arises from the consumption of soluble barium salts mislabelled as BaSO₄ (5).

Carbon Black - is a material produced by the incomplete combustion of heavy petroleum products such as FCC tar, coal tar, ethylene cracking tar, and a small amount from vegetable oil. (6)

Although these products are all ingredients in floral foam it should be taken into consideration that the extracted discussion above relates to the chemicals in general and is not related to their behaviour in the floral foam. These are not the only ingredients in floral foam and therefore the ones mentioned above is only a small component of the overall product.

Having one brick of floral foam in your house probably won't be harmful. Working in the factory that produces floral foam might be an entirely different situation.

At this stage I am looking for a biodegradable replacement, but I cannot find any in South Africa. I have, however contacted a company in the UK and enquired about the products they have available. They advised me that they are working on the development of the product and will keep me posted on their progress.

Well, there you have it. I think everyone agrees that this information should be printed on the box. Sadly it is not. My new year's resolutions are therefore to find alternative ways of arranging flowers and in the meantime to continue to advise my clients to please recycle the Oasis floral foam bricks, to keep it away from children and pests and to dispose of it as soon as the arrangement has wilted and died.