Are pesticides making florists sick?

“If someone had warned me, my daughter would still be here,” florist Laure Marivain told Le Monde. Her 11-year-old child, Emmy, died in 2022 after seven years battling leukaemia. In a landmark case two years later, French officials acknowledged a link between Emmy’s death and her exposure to pesticides during her mother’s pregnancy, when Laure was working as a florist.

Now, said The Guardian, voices from within the industry are “raising the alarm”.

‘Bleak picture’

Unlike food, there is “no upper limit” on the residue levels from pesticides sprayed onto cut flowers in the UK, EU or US, said The Guardian. And our bouquets are bursting with them. According to the British Florist Association, the UK imports around 85% of its flowers, often from countries like Ethiopia and Ecuador where pesticide regulations are limited.

A cocktail of chemicals protects flowers from disease and pests, helping to give customers “perfect blooms, year-round”. But for the people working with flowers for hours each day, pesticides can be “absorbed through skin contact or inhalation”. Buying a bouquet at your local shop “won’t necessarily put you at risk” – that is borne by the growers and florists.

The few studies that examine the link “paint a bleak picture”, said The Guardian. In 1990, research published in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health found that female Colombian flower workers, who were exposed to 127 different pesticides, had higher rates of premature births and birth defects.

Concerning levels of pesticides remain in shop-bought bouquets. A study from 2019 carried out by the University of Liège, for example, analysed samples from 90 Belgian flower shops and found 107 pesticides were present, 70 of which were detected in the florists’ urine samples. The authors recommended an “urgent need to raise the awareness” of the dangers of this level of exposure.

A public outcry following Emmy Marivain’s death saw the French government launch an initial study to examine the “exposure to pesticides faced by professionals in the flower industry”, said Le Monde. While the conclusions aren’t expected for a few more years, it is hoped the work will lead to “proposals for regulatory changes” such as setting upper maximum limits for pesticides and banning the importation of flowers found to have residue “classified as carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic to reproduction”.

Sustainability in bloom

Over in the UK, “the sustainable flower movement is blossoming”, said the Financial Times. Daylesford Organic in the Cotswolds, Organic Blooms in Bristol and Over the Hedge in Sheffield are among the “few UK flower growers that are certified organic by the Soil Association”. But small-scale growers are often “excluded” from this arena, as sustainable certifications can be prohibitively expensive.

When you “know what you’re looking for”, it becomes easier to spot which flowers are chemical-free. With roses, for example, unlike the “ramrod-straight stems” you see in the supermarket, sustainable flowers usually have shorter stems, with multiple heads. “They look like they’ve come from the garden”, florist and co-founder of the School of Sustainable Floristry, Cissy Bullock told the newspaper. Try to “buy local and seasonal” as you would with food or, “even better”, buy directly from the growers themselves.

For florists, though, avoiding pesticides is trickier. There are no “occupational hazard guidelines” available and many florists only learn about the risks through “word of mouth”, said The Guardian. Most florists “buy ‘blind’” from wholesalers as the labels often “lack clear information about chemical usage, origin and labour practices”. And with the cost of cut flowers soaring to “sky-high prices” and shrinking margins, it’s understandable that some may not want to address “something as insidious as pesticides. After all, you can’t see them, so it’s easy to pretend they’re not there.”