If you care about plants, then you probably care about the planet and environment too. And as a plant company, we care deeply about the natural environment, which is why are doing everything we can do be more sustainable and reduce our carbon footprint and the impact our business has on the environment.
That’s why we are doing everything we can to make Lazy Flora a completely plastic-free business, and whilst we work up to that we are making lots of other changes to the business to reduce our carbon footprint and be and caring to our natural environment as possible. Here’s how:
Our compost is now peat-free
Lazy Flora compost is officially peat-free. And it isn't just any peat-free compost, either. It's the best there is, from a Royal Horticultural Society-approved supplier. It's like the Gold standard of peat-free compost. We also ship it in strong biodegradable paper bags, rather than plastic.
The reason this is important is that the peat commonly used to form the basis of potting compost is harvested from peat bogs. Peat moss is amazingly fertile, highly absorbent, and sterile. It's a brilliant medium for growing plants. That's why gardeners have loved it for such a long time.
But the problem with peat is that it's not renewable. It takes millions of years for peat to form. And digging up peat bogs is not advisable either; a third of the world's carbon is stored in peat bogs, and harvesting it releases carbon dioxide, which is the main greenhouse gas driving climate change. Peat bogs are a fantastic carbon sink, digging it up just isn't smart, so we’ve gone peat-free to keep all that carbon in the ground.
We’re using hessian instead of biodegradable plastic bags
Until recently, we were also using biodegradable bags to cover our plant pots and reduce soil spillage in transit - we’ve now replaced these with hessian sacks. This is because biodegradable bags do biodegrade, it's kind of in their name, but they take a very long time to achieve this.
Hessian is made entirely from natural, vegetable fibres and is completely biodegradable. It can also be reused. Hessian is a popular material in arts and crafts and can be used for loads of other really useful things around the home.
We’ve reduced the use of our plastic air fill bags and bubble wrap
Using plastic packaging has been the single most uncomfortable compromise for Lazy Flora. It’s the one thing that irked me from the start, and it’s the one thing we just had to live with until we were in the position to do better. Thankfully, at the beginning of 2019, we started to make those changes.
We used to ship our plants in boxes padded with air-filled (and biodegradable) plastic bags but even though they were biodegradable, this still wasn’t good enough. We are now recycling our cardboard and shredding this into box packaging instead.
We are also using the shredded cardboard to wrap our pots, to reduce the use of bubble wrap. We’ve not been able to fully switch to this yet, but we have replaced 90% of our bubble wrap with recycled, shredded cardboard. It is a work in progress and we’re hoping to make a full switch in the very near future.
We’re trying to make all our packaging plastic free
We’re in the process of moving away from plastic packaging for the outdoor plants and are working with our packaging suppliers to come up with a solution to get this actioned as soon as we can.
