The Rose Parade is over, here’s what happens to the floats and their millions of flowers (2024)

Throughout the San Gabriel Valley and out into the Inland Empire, a post-Rose Parade tradition is taking place with little fanfare.

Volunteers and float builders are plucking flowers from the parade’s most popular floats, slicing up metal frames and setting aside thousands upon thousands of recyclable floral vials for next year’s bloom.

Update: How you can see the 2023 Rose Parade floats up close after the procession

In most cases, the metal, bent and weakened to form unique shapes, will be melted down by various recycling companies. Millions of flowers and thousands of other plants will become mulch or compost. Some will end up in landfills, others will help new life grow.

In the coming weeks, and months, next to nothing will remain of the up to $350,000 floats that brought joy and awe to Pasadena on New Year’s Day.

Typically, less than 5 percent of a Rose Parade float, not including the chassis and engine components, survives to be used the next year, according to Tim Estes, president of Fiesta Parade Floats.

“They’re that unique, that custom-built every year,” Estes said.

A client might keep certain pieces — such as a charm bracelet from the city of Carson’s giant treasure chest float this year — while others survive only if they’re generic enough to be re-usable. Think of the frames for butterflies, trees or giant flowers that have become staples of the colorful show.

Fiesta is busy preparing for other parades, and their dismantling process for 12 floats will take about two months, Estes said. For the last five years, Miracle-Gro, which uses Fiesta for its floats, has provided bins for discarded flowers and food.

This year’s Rose Parade used roughly 3.2 million flowers, from roses to orchids, mums and daisies, according to estimates provided to the Tournament of Roses. Other materials listed by the various participants include thousands of mushrooms, hundreds of lemons, 500 pounds of vegetables and plentiful assortments of seeds, rice and nuts.

At least 500,000 flowers were used by Fiesta alone, Estes estimated.

Everything collected at Fiesta is taken to Miracle-Gro’s plant in Chino, composted and then blended into a garden soil product used to help roses grow.

“It’s the circle of life for roses,” said Kim Markus, a spokeswoman for the gardening company.

At Phoenix Decorating Company, the builder of nine out of 14 award winners in 2018, more than a million flowers will be recycled into mulch, according to Chuck Hayes, who handles sponsor relations for the company. Little beyond the vials and mechanical components are reused. The floats simply have parts that are too big, or too iconic, to ever appear again on another design.

“It’s all stripped down to its core, and then we start again,” he said. “That’s where we get the ‘Phoenix’ part of this business.”

For the smaller self-builders, the dismantling process is a community event. Cal Poly Pomona and San Luis Obispo set up their “Dreams Take Flight” float, featuring cartoon animals flying through the sky, on Magnolia Lane on the Pomona campus. Community members were encouraged to visit and take any flowers they wanted.

The Sierra Madre Rose Float Association began taking apart its float “Chivalry” on Saturday. Volunteers and children helped remove the more than 40,000 flowers used on the award-winning depiction of a knight bandaging the paw of a dragon.

“We just have a bunch of (Boy) Scouts come in and take off the flowers,” said Kay Sappington, the association’s director of decorations.

Once the flowers are gone, they’ll using welding torches to remove the metal in pieces on Sundays over the next two weeks.

The association tries to recycle as much as possible. It auctions off pieces of the float, such as a sword and dragon egg this year, to kickstart fundraising for the following parade, bringing in about $3,000 to $4,000 out of the roughly $40,000 spent designing and building the floats.

“We’re all donations,” Sappington said.

Some, such as a simple tree, will go into storage in the hopes of finding another life in a future float. The larger set pieces, however, don’t usually make the cut because of limited space.They’re still trying to find an owner for that knight, if anyone is interested.

“The chances of us using another knight in the next five years is very small,” she said.

Once “Chivalry” is dismantled, the year-long planning cycle starts budding all over again.