Thirty Days of Rubbish: What Our Teaching Studio Actually Throws Away

In October we put a set of kitchen scales and a clipboard by the door of the teaching studio and started counting. Not the pretty stuff — not the buckets of dahlias or the finished arrangements going out to the cars. The other stuff. The things that leave the building in a bag.

The idea came from a student who asked, quite reasonably, what happens to all the offcuts. I gave a vague answer about composting. She looked at me the way you look at someone who has just claimed their car runs on good intentions. So we decided to find out properly.

The method (pedantic on purpose)

Four weeks. Nine workshops, sixty-two students, one wedding consultation, and a wreath demo that used more willow than any of us anticipated.

Everything leaving the bench was weighed or counted: green waste, plastic sleeves, cardboard, paper, twine, ribbon, wire, water. We kept three labelled bins — compost, recycling, landfill — and a notebook. Every evening someone wrote the numbers down. There was a certain amount of grumbling about this, mostly from me.

What a month actually looked like

Here's the headline set:

• Stems in: 1,340, weighing roughly 61 kg before conditioning.
• Green waste out: 28.4 kg. Just under half, by weight, of everything that came through the door.
• Plastic sleeves: 214, plus 38 box liners and a shoebox-sized pile of elastic bands.
• Wire: 1.9 kg of offcuts, and 340 stub wires cut, used once and binned.
• Ribbon: 112 metres of offcuts under twenty centimetres.
• Water: somewhere north of 600 litres, changed daily.

None of those numbers is scandalous on its own. Together they describe a fairly ordinary floristry business, which is exactly the point.

The four worst offenders

One: the five-minute haircut. We were cutting, on average, 38 per cent of stem length off in the first five minutes. Some of that is unavoidable — you need a fresh cut, and a metre of delphinium doesn't go in a bucket. But a lot of it was habit. Short stems are easier to handle, so short stems got made. And then short stems went in the bin, because the arrangement needed long ones.

Two: the sleeve reflex. Every bunch that arrived in plastic left in plastic, because that's how it came. We weren't re-using them, and we weren't asking suppliers not to send them.

Three: wire by default. Stub wires are brilliant for a buttonhole and completely unnecessary for holding a sprig of rosemary to a wreath. We were reaching for wire because wire is what florists reach for.

Four: the ribbon drawer. Nobody measured. Everybody cut long, because cutting short and being wrong is embarrassing. The result was a drawer full of ends too short to use and too nice to bin.

The changes that actually moved the numbers

We ran the same audit again in a single week at the end of the month, after four adjustments. Not a perfect comparison, but enough to see the direction of travel.

• Cut long, condition long. Stems now go into tall buckets first and get shortened only at the bench. Offcuts get graded into long, short and compost. The short pile goes to students for jam-jar work and posies, and to a local school for their nature table.
• A second-life box. Ribbon ends, twine, small seedheads, half-used candles. If it's under twenty centimetres it goes in the box, and the box gets raided before anything new is opened.
• Twine before wire. For anything that just needs holding, jute does the job. Wire is now for the specific cases where nothing else works.
• Sleeves out, buckets in. We asked two suppliers to deliver bare, in crates. Both said yes, which was mildly humiliating — we could have asked four years ago.
• Water to the border. Bucket water now goes on the shrubs at the back of the yard rather than down the drain. Flower food and all.

Compost-bin etiquette

If you take one thing from this, take the sorting rules. A compost heap is not a bin with better branding.

No wire. No rubber bands. No foam, ever. No ribbon, no cellophane, no plastic tags, no oasis tape. Chop thick stems and seedheads so they break down in a reasonable century. Keep ivy and willow in small pieces. And if your council takes green waste, check what they'll accept — many won't take treated or diseased material, and none of them want your floral foam.

The uncomfortable question

Can British floristry honestly call itself sustainable while most of us have never counted our own rubbish?

I don't think it can, not on the strength of British-grown stems alone. Local flowers cut the air miles, and that matters. But a British-grown stem wrapped in imported plastic, wired with imported wire and thrown in a landfill bag is still a waste problem with a nice accent.

The good news is that the fixes are mostly unglamorous and cheap: cut less, reuse more, ask suppliers awkward questions, and know what's in your bin. None of that requires a certification scheme or a new product line.

We're running the audit again in January. I'll report back, including the numbers we're least proud of.