Flowers After Weddings: Recycling at Its Most Beautiful

A recent article posted on the Huffington Post showed a truly beautiful gesture: the donation of the royal wedding’s floral bouquets to a hospice in London. With a wedding as big and high-profile as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s, you tend to forget that they’re both human beings — and, apparently, incredibly kind and generous human beings.

The newlywed couple donated some of their aromatic arrangements to a home for terminally ill patients, undoubtedly making their days.

Waste is all too common, with many people barely being bothered to recycle their cans and bottles on a day-to-day basis. Harry and Meghan’s simple act of reusing the incredibly expensive bouquets shows the possibilities for kindness and greenness in today’s booming wedding industry. With roughly 7% of a wedding’s cost going exclusively to floral arrangements — from the bouquets to the table centerpieces — why let so much money go right into the garbage after the evening is over? Florists’ bouquets can last much longer than that, sometimes more than a week, so after you save a few for yourself for nostalgia and memory’s sake, why not send flowers to someone who might appreciate them?

Around 83% of people stated that they prefer to receive flowers unexpectedly — that gives you an almost unlimited amount of leeway in picking who to surprise with your leftover floral arrangements. Donate to a funeral home and lighten an already immensely heavy load for an unsuspecting family. Delight a relative or friend with a leftover bouquet and watch the happiness spread. Pass them out at the end of your wedding reception so everyone can remember the joy they shared that night for a little while longer. Or follow in Harry and Meghan’s footsteps and send flowers to someone who may not have received any in a very long time.

It’s important to spread love and kindness when we can, whether we personally benefit from the act or not (although, almost always, the satisfaction of bringing joy and surprising someone is payment in itself). Share the love and recycle your flowers. Pay it forward, and maybe the trend will catch on and we’ll all be a little bit kinder to each other.