What Is A Circular Economy and How Do We Implement It?
Growing from the Earth and being used to restore soil back in the Earth, our flowers studio operates out of a circular business model with sustainability as its foundation. Committing to breaking the cycle of waste, and creating this circle, meant refusing some of the traditional models of running a flower company.
The circular economy is a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible. In this way, the life cycle of products is extended.
The first steps we took were to eliminate the use of materials like floral foam and plastic wrap, source flowers locally, and carefully compost all organic waste. The next decision was to offer a subscription model as our main service. Because we are an online studio and have no flowers on hand at a brick-and-mortar location, this allows us to only source the flowers needed for each set of arrangements. With no extra stock on hand, there are no unused flowers to throw away.
In fact, we’ve never thrown away our flowers. We gather gently used stems from our events and stylings, and we redesign them into beautiful bouquets. We donate these new bouquets to hospitals, hospices, and long-term care facilities for the flowers to be enjoyed as long as they live before being composted.
Beyond the flowers themselves, we take care in choosing the elements that surround them. From the materials used to create large installations, down to the smallest details of each ribbon and band around our hand-tied bouquets, we believe in quality, repurposing, and longevity.
In our studio, you can find rubber bands, chicken wire, and other floral materials that have been used and reused time and time again for events and bouquets from Bloomiér.
For our hand-tied bouquets, we choose ribbons of high quality to be repurposed for many celebrations to come, intentionally print with compost-friendly watercolour rather than wax on our protective paper, and instead of being delivered with a plastic water pouch, we transport our bouquets in water, ready to be transferred to our customers’ vases. We gladly re-collect any of these items upon our next delivery and are committed to repurposing them, for as long as they can last.
We also value feedback and learning, so we engage in conversations and have completed sustainability courses. We adjust where we find better practices, and we listen to the suggestions of others. We communicate within our industry where we see excess waste, ask questions, listen to others’ reasoning, and where we can, we present alternative solutions.
These choices are not always convenient, but we make them because we believe that beauty and sustainability go hand-in-hand, and we believe that these choices are always worth it.
