This year's Earth Day theme is Invest in Our Planet, with a focus on businesses and communities to join forces to encourage and help build healthier countries and economies. With the climate crisis becoming ever more pressing, each Earth Day that comes around take on extra gravity.
Image: Shropshire Petals Flower Field
Earth Day in a Nutshell
Falling on the 22nd April every year, it's a time of the year where environmental issues take centre stage and is marked by millions around the world.
Earth Day dates back to the 1970's with the movement designed to educate and shine a light on the serious environmental issues we're all facing, from the climate crisis to deforestation and air pollution. It really is a chance for us all to show what we can do in our day to day lives and businesses to protect the planet.
Wherever you are in the world, whatever you do, we can all work together to continue to make the best choices.
We're an Eco-Conscious Company
The environment is such an important issue for all the Shropshire Petals team, we are continually developing and improving what we do to improve the sustainability of our products and practices. All the petals we grow here on our farm go on to create our beautiful sustainable confetti which is natural and biodegradable, all of which carry a significantly low carbon foot print.Completely natural in colour, no dyes are ever added and they're personally handpicked by our amazing harvest team and packed in the petal shed for the all-important confetti moment! It's no secret that we love helping wildlife and our flower fields make a fantastic sanctuary for wildlife like bees, butterflies and other insects alike.
Image: A little bee enjoying our Apricot Statice
The earth's recovery is always at the forefront of our minds, we're committed to do things as sustainably as possible choosing sustainable materials. Whether it's our fully recyclable and compostable confetti bags, carbon neutral confetti cones, dispatch boxes made from recycled material and use plant-based inks, or even the fact we've gone paperless with our invoices, we're always making improvements.
Image: Shropshire Petals Dispatch Boxes
Each day we strive to do better and make improvements on how we carry out our day-to-day business to help to prevent harm to our planet. As with all things, change doesn't happen overnight and we've not yet reached where we want to be, but we're most certainly working hard on changing that!
Solar Powered Farm
Solar energy is clean and environmentally friendly, which makes us proud to say that the majority of the farm is run off solar power. Extra units from the grid are only purchased in our super busy periods to get all the lovely petals picked and processed.
We have some very exciting news here at Shropshire Petals. We've never been afraid of trying something new, and so recently we have had an epic robot join the Shropshire Petal team (we can't agree on a name yet, we may get your help!). The robot automatically drives up and down our fields planting our flowers and will even weed them too, best of all it uses the sun's energy to power it, pretty cool right?!
We look forward to sharing more about our amazing little earth loving bot with you soon. Not only does it run on solar energy, but it also leaves less of a footprint on our soil, as we're committed to improving our soil health as part of our ongoing regenerative farming practises.
Image: Our fab new robot
Regenerative Farming
Regenerative agriculture offers the promise of agricultural practices that reduce pollution and capture carbon - cbf.org
We're dedicate to improve our footprint on the environment around us and make it sustainable for future generations, Tom Pedge on our arable team, has been the guiding force behind this initiative.
We have adopted several approaches to work toward a regenerative agriculture system including the use of cover crops, improve natural predators and beneficials by improving biodiversity and creating richer environments through stewardship around the fields, alongside working closely with our agronomist.
More benefits of regenerative farming can be found here.
Flower Field Summer 2021
How You Can Play Your Part
Whether its big our small there are so many options in which we can play a part to make a better world every day of the year, not just today.
To get you started we have listed five things that you could easily fit into your day-to-day life, some of you may already being doing these and that's fantastic!
- Buy your food locally.
Calculating your food print will help you understand the impact of your current food choices.
- Encourage a local clean-up, even if it's just your street (it's a start).
Get the kids involved too, you can actually make it fun, it will also educate them and the community on the effects of waste on the environment.
- Always carry reusable bags.
There's no excuse these days with the array of sustainable bags available and the foldable options which makes it easy to keep on our person or in our cars.
It's estimated that we use 4 TRILLION plastic bags each year worldwide - earthday.org. Let's try to attack this figure together!
- Purchase a reusable water bottle.
Not only will you save money; you're saving the planet too. Let's face it if you have a jazzy bottle to drink your water out of it encourages you to drink more, which is benefiting your health too (win-win!). Us SP girls are big fans of the stylishly sustainable Chillys Bottles, they have so many pretty colours to choose from.
- Only purchase cleaning products that are healthy for the environment.
When doing the weekly shop make sure to read the labels on the products, they will clearly identify what makes them green and exactly what environmental benefits they provide.
For more tips, information and details on how you can be part of this amazing movement visit earthday.org.
Let's all do what we can to save this glorious planet.
Happy Earth Day!
Love SP Xx
