Being Green

Being green……..our progress towards making Linden Grove Flowers a greener company.
The floral industry and Linden Grove have made many changes over the last 20 years.

SOURCING PRODUCT AND FARMING PRACTICES
We continually strive to make Linden Grove Flowers a more eco-friendly company largely through getting to know the farmers and suppliers that we purchase our flowers and vases from. We have spent many years building these relationships and we rely on their expertise of their products and their knowledge of how their products are produced.

We love locally grown flowers and use them all year. There are some items that we especially love like, flowering branches, peonies, delphinium, freesia, ornithogalum, zinnias, calla lilies, dahlias and mums.

Due to pressure from the West, many farms in South America have become fair trade and like many Ontario farms, use natural pesticides (good insects brought in to combat the bad insects). Our main suppliers who bring in product from South America have very strong mandates and regularly check their farm practises. They support fair trade farms and safe factories in China where a good portion of glass comes from.
We prefer European made glass and do our best to use it whenever possible.

Many European growers have state of the art facilities and use renewable sources of energy and water recycling.
The Ontario farmers that we do most of our business with grow their gorgeous blooms outside, so there is no greenhouse energy being used.

FUEL
The imported flowers that we use come in on passenger planes as opposed to cargo planes. For our deliveries, we use a co-op service of drivers that deliver to specific areas of Toronto and the GTA. We have built relationships with individuals who work with us to deliver function work and we are members of Autoshare.

PACKAGING

All of our flowers and vases come in boxes. We return our flower boxes back to our suppliers to re-use. Any cardboard that is not sent back including the cardboard rose sleeves, we re-use ourselves.

Anything that we can’t re-use, we re-cycle.  Luckily for us,  the majority of the waste that we generate is compostable.

A few years ago, we switched from cellophane to corn film. This film is produced by a Canadian company called Greenshift and is 100% compostable. It can go directly into your compost bin and it will literally turn into soil.

DESIGNING

Like many florists, we really do prefer to not use floral foam.  We do our best to make the majority of our flower arrangements in glass vases with water and only use floral foam when necessary.  We hope to phase out using it altogether until an eco version is introduced to our industry.

When we receive our flowers back from our corporate clients, we do our best to use them for a few days in our window displays.  For most of our displays, we always try to use natural compostable items.

We are continually trying to improve our knowledge about where our products come from and we strive to move forward and make necessary changes to be a responsible and ethical company.