Reduce the environmental footprint of a business, a whole challenge!

Reduce the environmental footprint of a business, a whole challenge!

Among flower souls, we seriously looked into the issue, which allowed us to modify our way of working and our selection of products.

First, packaging and containers. What material? Plastic bottle or glass bottle? Compostable or recyclable bags? It seems simple, but these questions are actually very complex. So we brought in a specialist in material management to help us better understand and decide.

Bottles

As we are an online business and the majority of orders are sent by post, the option of glass bottles for all our liquid products was very expensive and very risky. The delivery costs of a package are calculated in part at the weight. The window weighs much heavier than plastic. The packages would therefore be heavier and more polluting. In addition, the risks that the customer receives his damaged products are high. Finally, the production of glass leaves an ecological footprint and it is not all the municipalities that manage to recycle the glass well. The plastic is not ideal and we are very easy to make that environmental measures be implemented. For example, bacteria that eat plastic is a method that already exists, but for the moment our solution is to keep plastic bottles for large formats (250 ml and more) and to opt for glass bottles for Small formats (100 ml and less). You should know that our customers often place large orders and it is not a question of posting a single glass bottle per package. The PET plastic bottles that we use are recyclable, but above all reusable. We have also chosen labels that are easily removed to allow reuse. The small plastic cap is not recyclable, however, because plastic, to be recyclable, must be recognized by the sorter machine in the sorting center and it is more difficult to ensure that the cap will be properly recycled. So we brought aluminum caps that have a better recycling rate to overcome this problem.

The bags

We had great hopes for the compostable bags, but unfortunately, this option turned out to be not very viable. We have a multitude of solid and semi-solid products which have different effects on the material of the bag and which all require good protection against air to avoid oxidation. The compostable bags are permeable and decompose after a few months. Unfortunately, they are not suitable for enclosing citric acid, menthol crystals or even certain powdered plants such as ginger and cayenne pepper, to name only these raw materials. In addition, compostable bags, to our surprise, are not accepted in municipal compost bins. You have to compost them at home, which is not obvious for everyone. Our solution? Use a resistant bag made of recyclable plastic. Our bags now display the #2 recycling logo to well identify the material and keep the consumer informed. Do not forget to remove the label before recycling the bag.

The stickers

We have thought of the compostable labels, but the quality leaves something to be desired and they do not hold well. We wanted to have labels that remain beautiful in time, which resist water and oil, because it is important that the customer can read the information on the label at all times, and which easily set off for the reuse of containers. We try to reduce the ink used as much as possible and use as little color as possible.

In the best of all worlds, we would like to use containers made of recycled and recyclable materials, which would generate a circular chain of material recovery. However, these products are still very expensive and little available on the market. We stay on the lookout!

Following these reflections, a household imposed itself in our container offer in order to reduce our purchase of plastic and non -recyclable container. Although we still use certain plastic containers for the packaging of our products, we have reduced the sale of plastic containers as much as possible to favor the use of glass by our customers.

Mutual aid is also a great ally in our environmental approach. Our wonderful manager, Éléonore, has established a partnership with other local businesses to recycle packaging. We have therefore filed bins with our partners to recover their packaging and use them for your packages. Boxes, kraft paper, bubble plastic, peanuts, egg boxes, etc. We are used to pack your packages. In addition, a collection of Christmas paper is carried out each year with customers and residents of Laurentides. Thus, we give a 2^e 

Then, we decided to help environmental companies and organizations through applications like "Planet" which offers neutral carbon deliveries. For each package sent, a contribution is sent to companies that eliminate carbon in the atmosphere, which store carbon for more than 1,000 years or which are looking for solutions such as ocean extraction and direct capture in the air.

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