Florida Fresh is the company Robert runs. It's shared here as a working example, not a sales pitch, because the fastest way to learn is to see a real program, gaps included.
Florida Fresh produces about 1,500 events a year in Central Florida: floral, plants, props, décor and fabrication. Here is what its program looks like today, organized by the three pillars. Every figure below is as reported by Florida Fresh. Where a number is an estimate, it says so.
Living plants such as palms, ficus, ferns and bromeliads are grown in Florida Fresh's own greenhouse in Central Florida, which is MPS certified. A palm at an Orlando event comes from a few miles away, and goes back to the greenhouse afterward to be used again.
Cut flowers come from named, certified farms: Florverde, Rainforest Alliance, Fair Trade and BloomCheck. Florida Fresh has had a relationship for about ten years with an eco-certified rose farm in Ecuador.
A large rental inventory of containers, furniture, props and backdrops moves from event to event. The in-house fabrication shop designs custom pieces to be modular, so they can be re-skinned for the next event instead of rebuilt and thrown away.
Designs use chicken wire, pin frogs and water. When a design truly can't work without foam, a biodegradable product is used. Read why.
Organics from every event go into bins at the shop and are collected twice a week by O-Town Compost, about 30,000 pounds a year. Read how.
What can't be eliminated is offset: 120 metric tons of carbon offsets a year through TerraPass, funding a reforestation project in Peru. Florida Fresh has also planted more than 900 pongamia trees on about five acres in Florida. Its conservative estimate is around 20 tons of CO2 a year, and that is an estimate, not a certified number. A 25-point evaluation report and a simple carbon calculator let clients see an event's footprint and what was avoided.
Many of the partner farms employ more than 60% women. Robert visits the source farms in person. Here at home, the program depends on local drivers, crews and designers, and on local jobs in Central Florida.
When one partner handles floral, props and lighting together, one or two trucks come off the road for that event: fewer delivery cycles and fewer strike runs. Florida Fresh estimates that typically saves the client $1,200 to $2,400 per event, and avoids 150 to 300 pounds of CO2. The greenest choice and the cheapest choice turned out to be the same choice. That's when sustainability stops being a debate and becomes a habit.
SUSTAINABLE EVENTS. CHOICES THAT MATTER.