A new era of transparent assessment for floriculture

The PEFCR ruleset allows companies to calculate the environmental impact of floriculture products per pot or stem. This is easy for the customer to understand, and because the calculation rules are the same for everyone, you can compare between products. This is great both to see where you fall in the floriculture landscape, but also for experimenting with different ways to reduce your impact.
The Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) method is based on life cycle assessment (LCA), which makes it robust and transparent. A PEFCR contains clear standardized calculation rules for a specific product group and it covers 16 impact categories. Because the method is LCA-based, it includes every impact from extraction of raw materials to the end of the product’s life cycle.

Easier to understand for customers

What it means for a floriculture product to be more sustainable isn’t always easy to describe. Consumers are very interested in understanding the concepts behind that. How much does it matter to fly flowers in or grow them locally? What is the influence of the flower type and season? Consumers would like to be able to take that information into account when buying a bouquet or a houseplant, without having to do complex calculations themselves. Many growers of flowers and potted plants were already doing their own environmental footprint calculations. By developing a PEFCR, this sense of initiative can now be harnessed into standardized efforts that elevate the entire sector.
That’s what the FloriPEFCR is going to help with. Because there are no cut-and-dry answers to the questions above. Flying flowers in by plane obviously comes with an environmental cost. But so does growing them locally, especially in places like the Netherlands where growing greenhouse flowers takes a lot of electricity and we already have a eutrophication problem. In the end, it depends – and that’s why we need a good calculation method. In the near future, integration of sustainability data with existing software will make it possible for a florist to tell exactly what the impact is of the different bouquets, even custom ones.

Making the FloriPEFCR easier to adopt

From our decades of experience at PRé, we know that adopting a method like the PEF can be daunting at first. Especially for individual farmers, who often don’t measure exactly how much they use in terms of water, pesticides, fertilizer, etc. The first step is gaining maturity in data collection. For bigger companies, the step will be smaller, since they usually have many of their systems automated, and can simply export that data.

To offset the different levels of maturity in the sector and support the competitiveness of small farms, the Floriculture Sustainability Initiative (FSI) NGO has established a range of standards and platforms to help collect the required data. They are here to help producers of flowers and cut plants take the first steps towards implementing PEF data collection. Because a level playing field includes companies of all sizes.

Next steps towards a more sustainable floriculture sector

Developing a PEFCR is a challenging project, which requires careful deliberation and analysis. That is the whole point – to do a lot of work up front to think things through and talk to a wide variety of stakeholders. The more that we clarify concepts during the PEFCR development process, the more reliable the results are, and the more companies in the sector and their customers can enjoy the benefits.
Now, we are ready for the sector to adopt it. Customers may well be very motivated by sustainability metrics. Many customers want to be more sustainable in their habits, without giving up something they really enjoy. This PEFCR is the next step towards making it easy to check these metrics when you’re at the flower shop. Just like you can check the origin of strawberries in the supermarket.

The sector is also doing interesting innovations, such as experimenting with shipping. Many types of flowers are usually flown in, to get from the field to the table in 24 hours. But several of those would hold up just as well after being transported in a cooled shipping container, while reducing their footprint. With the PEFCR, we would be able to easily understand what’s the difference in environmental footprint between the two approaches.

Related customer case

Flori Footprint Tool – LCAs of floriculture, accessible at your fingertips

Methodological innovations in this PEFCR

Every industry and sector is different, and the PEF framework is still relatively new. Each PEFCR development project is therefore a great opportunity to innovate, which future PEFCRs may also benefit from. For the FloriPEFCR, the innovations were around verification rules for footprinting tools, and defining classes of performance.

• We’ve developed a way to verify tools against the PEFCR. The benefit for companies who use such a tool is that it allows them to reduce their verification requirements. This makes it easier – and often cheaper – to do assessments.
• We are paving the way towards defining performance classes, similar to the NutriScore system in the supermarket or energy use labels for your new refrigerator. To do this well, it is necessary to gather a significant amount of data points, to properly establish the spectrum along which these performance classes fall. FSI, the same NGO who is reducing barriers to entry for small farms, is following up on creating such a data point platform.

Get started today with the FloriPEFCR!

A key element for promoting sustainable change in floriculture is here. Are you a floriculturist, retailer or trader in the floriculture sector, and would you like to get started with measuring and communicating the environmental footprint of your products? Then get in touch. At PRé, we’ve not only played a part in developing these harmonized assessment rules for the floriculture sector and for other sectors, we’ve also helped many companies get started with integrating these metrics into their daily operations. We’d be more than happy to do the same for you.