Giving floral waste a second life

Flowers speak a universal language. They symbolise love, celebration, special moments, and sometimes even grief. That is why fresh flowers are a popular gift or decoration item for occasions. The global floriculture market, valued at around $55 billion, is projected to touch about $85 billion by 2032. Similarly, as per reports, the Indian floriculture market is expected to grow by 11.7% during 2023-2032. With this growing consumption of flowers comes growing waste accumulation after each cycle, posing challenges in waste management and disposal.

Globally, the story of unmanaged flower waste management is yesterday’s news. A new shift in how we see unwanted ornamental flowers is the growing interest in their rich biochemicals and their potential to support a circular floral bioeconomy.

India, which generates over 300 tons of floral waste every day, arguably, stands at the forefront of flower waste innovations. In the last few years, India has witnessed several start-ups developing incense, compost, soaps and candles from floriculture waste from religious places and daily activities.

At the global stage, designer Irene Purasachit has developed bio (floral) foam from the stems of flower waste; British biotech firm Sparxell creates biodegradable colour pigments from plant-based cellulose. In India, Kanpur-based Phool has developed vegan leather from floral waste, which it calls ‘fleather’. These innovations are the beginning of a new dawn in this ecosystem.

A new tribe of innovators is exploring the possibilities of this biomaterial to develop products which move beyond the production of conventional incense sticks or compost. In April, a group of researchers — Souvik Mandal, Sudipta Pahari and Abhijit Behera — led by retired professor Raj Kishore Patel from the National Institute of Rourkela developed biodegradable packaging material using cellulose derived from flower waste. These three students worked on this project during their academic tenure at NIT-Rourkela.

The project began in 2022 when the team surveyed the city’s flower waste mechanisms. “Rourkela is a small city, and our survey highlighted that around 2.5 tons of used flowers go into waste daily. The number increases during festival time,” Patel tells Mongabay India. The team of chemical researchers explored various ways to extract cellulose from floral biomass to develop sturdy material. A series of experiments later, the team has developed a cost-effective and scalable product that Patel says is suitable for industrial production. NIT Rourkela has also secured the patent for the process, which he describes as suitable for industrial production.

The process begins by sun-drying flower parts like petals and sepals for two-three days, followed by boiling to extract pure cellulose by removing oils, lignin, and celluliginin. After air-drying, a binding solution is prepared using polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), thickened, and combined with glycerol. This mixture is stirred, then blended with the cellulose and stirred again for 30 minutes to form the main solution. The mixture is poured into mould and dried for 15 hours.

The full process — from cellulose extraction to moulding — takes four to six hours and can be easily scaled by industries without major technological investment. Tests show the material offers high tensile strength (190-370 kg/cm²), good tear resistance (50-80g/100 gauge), and decomposes within 50 days without releasing toxins or microplastics. “The use of widely available materials (PVA, glycerol, flower waste) and familiar methods like pressing and stirring allows easy adaptation by packaging industries without significant overhaul of existing infrastructure,” Patel adds.

The future of sustainable fragrances

Parimala Shivaprasad’s fascination with unwanted flowers began in her hometown, Bengaluru, in 2013 when she was studying chemical engineering as an undergraduate student. She would pass piles of floral waste during her walks from home to the university. “All I could think back then was how I could solve this problem as a chemical engineer?” Shivaprasad tells Mongabay India over a video call. While the question remained in her mind, navigating college life took over. It wasn’t until 2018, when she went to the University of Bath that her experimentation with unused floral biomass started showing tangible results. “I realised we can extract something from them… I call it crude flower oil these days,” she says with joy.

These days, as the assistant professor at the University of Nottingham, she is leading a team of researchers on this passion project of making sustainable fragrances. However, the group is also examining the properties of floral waste to explore the pool of possibilities this “crude flower oil” possesses. “We are first trying to chemically understand what is happening within those compounds and how we can change their properties. Can sustainable packaging be made from these extracts, as plastics are made from crude oil… these are the questions we are asking ourselves,” she mentions.

Global multinational company Unilever has partnered with the University of Nottingham for a pilot study to develop sustainable and cost-effective fragrances from unused flowers. Shivaprasad plays a pivotal role in this partnership, as Nottingham Labs is developing energy-efficient instruments that create a lot of tiny bubbles around the flowers which then collapse and disrupt the cell walls, enabling one to extract oils into a solvent. This process reduces the process of fragrance extraction to 20 minutes. “We are using low-energy extraction instead of the traditional process that not only reduces the time of extraction but also allows us better control over temperature,” says Shivaprasad, who is also the founder of India-based social enterprise Retra, which aims to develop flower waste biorefineries for fragrance extraction.

As part of the Unilever project, Shivaprasad is exploring the idea of developing modular biorefineries, serving as the conceptual basis for Retra, to minimise the carbon impact of flower waste’s resource-intensive supply chain. “The biggest issue with flowers is that you need a lot of flowers to get small amounts of extracts. You are not bringing them to a chemical plant, as these are low volume but high value extracts. With this partnership, we have gone back to the drawing board to structure a plan and a process that offers long-term profitability. A modular flower-waste biorefinery with multiple processing units could be the answer,” she points out, adding that for this project, they will be using unused flowers from Lincolnshire’s Bridge Farm Group — the largest producer of ornamental flowers in the UK.

Shivaprasad was recently awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Frontiers Champions Awards, where she would be working with prestigious Indian academic institutions, such as Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, to develop a stakeholder network to start bringing the vision of biorefineries to life. “I haven’t forgotten what I plan to do in India, I always had this passion for establishing flower-based biorefineries which can decentralise the collection and processing of waste flowers,” she says.

Watch: [Video] Flowers of worship sow seeds of sustainability

Navigating the challenges of scalability and geography

Scalability however, is still a challenge. “From the start, we have been clear that we are not an incense or soap-making company. We have a larger aim of investing in new technological innovations to identify several pathways that could open up using floral waste; a waste that is a global occurrence,” shares Maya Vivek, founder of Hyderabad-based start-up, Oorvi Sustainable Concepts, which she started with co-founder Minal Dalmia. The for-profit enterprise develops products from floral waste through their brand HolyWaste. According to Maya, HolyWaste has gained recognition as well as visibility from the government and consumers.

Even so, recognition isn’t enough in a highly competitive FMCG market, where start-ups like HolyWaste have to compete against the popular brands of this fast-moving segment. In the last couple of years, HolyWaste has scaled down its operations. Presently, they have employed seven workers and handle 500 kg of floral waste per week. “We are a bootstrapped company, and the fact remains that we haven’t seen profits yet. To sustain the business, we had started making products, but when you are pitted against big giants, you need deep pockets or funding — we haven’t got any.”

In a similar vein, Patel is already in talks with two companies for commercial production. “Any innovation is successful when it is available for a larger audience. This innovation has the potential to open up micro-entrepreneurial opportunities for flower waste collectors and rural cooperatives, especially in countries like India with abundant floral biomass,” says Patel.

On the other hand, Shivaprasad faces the challenges of ensuring fragrance consistency in sustainable extracts — something synthetic fragrances made from petrochemical feedstocks have optimised. “One of the main challenges identified last year was the seasonal variability and differing floral compositions, which led to inconsistent fragrance outputs. Additionally, geographic location emerged as a complicating factor.”

“For example, roses in India have a completely different profile from the roses in the UK. How do we optimise the fragrances in whatever processes we are developing? That too, when the sources are from different locations? We are now trying to understand the fundamental composition of flowers and examine how they react to things we add and their interaction with the environment. This surely is a key technical challenge and important to tackle,” mentions Shivaprasad.

Read more: Extreme heat and erratic rain affected flower production and livelihood of vendors in 2024

Banner image: A man cleans up floral waste. Image by Nico Crisafulli via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).