Did you buy your mother flowers yesterday? While those sweet-smelling roses may bring a smile to your mother’s face, unless you cut them from your own backyard, those flowers are not making the environment smile. The floriculture industry, which thrives off of days of celebration like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day and birthdays, in fact has huge impacts on the environment through water usage, pollution, land degradation, and fossil fuel transportation emissions. Some estimates account that one hectare of a flower farm consumes over 900 cubic meters of water per month!

If you haven’t ever thought about how those roses reached you, let’s take a look. About 80% of all roses come from South America or Africa, where they are often grown with intense irrigation systems to provide for their thirst and sprayed with pesticides to protect them from pests. (So be careful of burying your nose into those oh so fragrant petals). From those warmer countries, they must be shipped on planes to other parts of the world. Because roses are so fragile, they must be transported in refrigerated containers as soon as they are budding. That includes refrigerated trucks to transport them from airports to their final florist destinations. Flowerpetal.com reports that sending the roughly 100 million roses of a typical Valentine’s Day produces some 9,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from field to U.S. florist.