WHILE many other local residents throw away their festive flowers, those living in the Mashan community, Luohu District, are doing their bit for the environment by entrusting them to volunteers who will look after them until next year’s Spring Festival.

It is a long tradition in Guangdong to buy plants and flowers, especially small potted orange trees, to decorate homes during the Spring Festival.

Some people also purchase expensive flowers like peonies and orchids as gifts for friends. However, once the festival is over, the flowers have passed their best and become a headache. As few distributors are willing to recycle the flowers, most end up being thrown away.

Now volunteers in the Mashan community, Dongxiao Street, have begun a service to look after people’s festive flowers.

“Randomly discarded orange trees are normally a nuisance and eyesore on local roads. Cleaners have to remove the broken pots and the mess from the oranges, leaves and soil. It is also a waste, since the orange trees can live for more than a year,” Zhou Guidi, a volunteer, was quoted by the Daily Sunshine as saying.

“Just give us a call and we will come to your homes to collect the plants,” she said.

Residents are then given a card bearing a number, their name and general description of the plant with an identical card attached to the pot, making it easy for the owners to reclaim their property next year.

The plants are taken to a garden in the community, where interested residents are also being invited to work during their leisure time.

Many local residents throw their plants and flowers away after the plants die in a corner of their balcony, the Chinese report said.

“My friend gave me several pots of Belgian azaleas, each worth more than 1,000 yuan (US$129). I don’t know how to look after these plants and can do nothing but let them die in the corner,” said a woman surnamed Yu who lives in Donghai Garden in Futian.

Withered flowers discarded near residential blocks create extra work for cleaners. “They have to clear unsold festival flowers thrown away by farmers after the Spring Festival eve and then after the Lantern Festival, when people start throwing away their flowers,” said an official with the city’s environmental hygiene department.

“We sent more than 1,000 workers and a number of trucks to clear discarded plants from flower fairs on the Spring Festival eve. The plants were compressed before being buried. The volume of flowers thrown away after the Lantern Festival each year is simply too large to calculate,” he said.

However, given the high cost of retrieving the flowers, local farmers are unwilling to provide a service similar to that offered by the community volunteers.

“Flowers like tulips will not bloom two years in a row. Festive flowers are a disposable commodity,” said a distributor at the city’s agricultural science center.

(Li Dan)