Could you imagine a world without flowers?
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We are used to flowers, they have been always there: a birthday, a weeding, a funeral and on every other occasion you can think of - mostly flowers are part of it. But now - could you imagine not having them?
Facing the all the problems that are now in the floral industry, we see that we need solutions to keep our flowers.
First of all, we need to more trainees in the floral industry.
A statistic of the federal office of statistics in Germany shows that the number of trainees drops from 8.068 to 2.424 in the years 2002 until 2018. This is a huge loss. Why? If you think of getting a beautiful bunch of flowers for your partner, you want a special and fancy one. So you go to the florist a few streets away from your appartment and let him create a bouquet which is corresponding to your imaginations of it. Then you pay for it - and you realize it is not cheap, but you want the best for your partner. Good. But in many cases people can‘t afford it to buy special flowers like this. So they go to a supermarket and buy a simple bouquet of flowers for 3,50€ and after three days the flowers land in the trashcan because of their bad quality. And if the florist could offer his flowers for a lower price he would have more customers.
Why are flowers in the supermarket a bad idea?
The flowers in our supermarkets are imported from other countries, they come from a "mass production" - far away from all natural ways. The biggest import of roses comes from the Netherlands (2018, federal office of statistics in germany) and from Kenia.
Kenia, at the Lake Naivasha: People work here on the flower farms from early in the morning until late in the evening under really bad conditions and for a very low wage. So the situation looks very bad - the farms have to keep cold air for the flowers although it is nearly 32° Celsius outside. The flowers are treated with pesticides which are harmful for the health of the workers and the resulting diseases are also genetically inheritable. Researchers from the University of California in San Diego have found altered short-term neurological behaviors in children associated with a peak pesticide spraying (https://health.ucsd.edu/news/relea- ses/Pages/2017-05-10-neuro- behavioral-effects-found-in-chidren-exposed-to-flower-pesticides.aspx).And in the end the flowers are being sold in various discounters for a cheap price - and the flower shops in Germany for example will not survive because of that.
The price is more important for the customer than the quality and the creativity of a florist. And so if there are no flower shops, there are are no apprenticeships for florists and no trainees - a vicious cycle.
With my project Flower Shop I want to draw our attention to the gift of nature that is given to us in form of flowers and with time it changed into a big industry including parts that compete against each other with negative consequences.
Could you imagine a world without flowers? If not, then we need to rethink where we buy our next flowers and give the local florist the opportunity to make people happy by selling beautiful, fresh flowers and creating individual bouquets which are not transported through half of the globe which only further pollutes the environment.
So this project is an idea of how our flowers could look like in the future - just take the printed flower, scan the QR code, get to this website and download the app with the link below. After opening the app hold the printed flower in front of your camera and you‘ll see a flower in 3D format.If you don‘t want to download the app you can just click on the flowers below the link, then you click on the 3D model and if your camera opens up, you can also hold the printed flower in front of it to see the 3D flower.
