For a young couple, their wedding day is meant to be the happiest day of their lives. A room full of friends and family comes to see two people profess their love for each other to the world. But little do most people know, your wedding day can also be the most wasteful day of your life. The average wedding produces anywhere from 400 to 600 pounds of garbage in one day. With an estimated 203 million weddings in the U. S. per year, that’s over 1 billion pounds of garbage a year from American weddings alone. Millions of dollars are spent on items intended for mere hours of enjoyment, and are then discarded. This doesn’t have to be the case. A nonprofit company called rEvent has taken on this issue and intends to find new uses for those items once the wedding is over. Their main project involves 
collecting flowers from an event and rearranging them into Bedside Bouquets. These bouquets are then given to local charitable organizations like hospitals and assisted living homes. They also take nonperishable décor items and donate them to arts and education programs. While finding alternative uses for these items extends their lifespan, these items still eventually end up as waste. The efforts of rEvent help make the luxury of events accessible to more people, but don’t get to the root of the problem of wasteful event practices.
For any company, first impressions come from the name. rEvent branded their company with a nod to the three R’s of simple waste management: reduce, reuse, recycle. This catchy trio instantly reminds us of sustainable practices, directly linking the company to waste management. But they don’t stop at the title. The company’s webpage uses different “re-” words throughout to emphasize the connection. They engage the classic Three R’s while also adding their own like repurpose, rearrange, and redistribute. They even keep the theme going by making up words like “resmile”. This motif grounds one of the central ideas of the company: environmental sustainability is serious business, but it can also spread joy and happiness.
rEvent defined itself so they would be instantly associated with green living and waste management; their logo even uses the recycle symbol of a triangle of arrows. 
However, their practices may not be as “green” as you may think. Even flowers that have been given to hospital patients die and end up as waste, most likely in a landfill somewhere. And where the flowers end up later in life does not change the unsustainable practices it took to grow them. Most flowers in the U.S. are imported from other countries—this means keeping the flowers in refrigerated warehouses before, during, and after shipping them to the U.S. all the way until they reach the wedding venue—which requires lots of energy and emits lots of carbon. These flowers also aren’t grown under U.S. regulations. They can be doused in pesticides and preservatives that are toxic to humans and bad for the environment because they are still legal in the countries they are grown in. Unfortunately, rEvent’s Bedside Bouquets do nothing to fix these unsustainable growing practices or the volume of waste created by an event. They merely prolong the life of waste before it is thrown away.
In order to get people to use their service, rEvent makes an impressive argument through their website. First of all, the information you need is easy to find. Each section of information is clearly labeled with a large heading on top of a relevant picture. Under the sections, subsection headers provide even more organization. The text comes in neat blocks with keywords bolded. This allows the reader to easily pick out the information they need without having to sort through long paragraphs of information. They also make it as easy as possible to actually schedule your donation pick up. At the top of every page on the site, there is a button that says, “Make a Donation Here!” They have additional “Schedule Pickup” buttons throughout the page. That way, a reader doesn’t even have to think to make their donation happen—it’s just a click of a button away.
But rEvent really locks in costumers with the images they chose. One of the first pictures displayed on the site is of a rEvent volunteer woman giving a bouquet of flowers to a little girl in a hospital gown. By depicting a sick little girl being helped by the company, readers are compelled to join the cause and schedule a pick up for their event. Because the company’s main clientele comes from weddings, the overall design of the page reflects the style of modern weddings. When the web page is first opened up, the very first image displayed is of three flower bouquets being held by bridesmaids. The page has a simple color scheme with white as its base. Even the company name is in fancy script like a wedding invitation. The design makes rEvent feel like it would fit right into a costumer’s wedding. rEvent is not merely a company that wants to help you recycle; it’s a company made specifically with weddings and elegant events in mind run by people familiar with the wedding industry. This helps the company’s image and credibility with its intended clients.
rEvent easily fits into any wedding, perhaps too easily. Sign up is easy, they come and handle part of clean up for you, and not only is it free, it’s tax-deductible. You can actually save some of the thousands you spend on flowers by donating to rEvent. These benefits allow event planners to make their lives easier and feel good while doing it because it’s all for charity. rEvent will even help you advertise your do-gooding to the whole party—and all of their Twitter followers—through custom table cards and event hashtags. Suddenly everyone in attendance is impressed with the eco-friendly wedding and the bride and groom barely had to lift a finger. This may be a bigger problem than it appears. A couple can have a trendy and luxurious wedding with all the excess they want but not realize the damage it is causing. And all the guests will feel good about attending an eco-friendly wedding, when the ceremony itself is no different than it would have been without rEvent’s help. This creates a culture of trendy “green” weddings that could easily catch on without doing any real good for the environment. That’s not to say that the humanitarian side of this project is not valuable. Spreading the wealth and joy of a wedding to those in need is a perfect form of charity. But rEvent’s branding misleads consumers to believing they are doing as much environmental good as social good.
The mission of rEvent focuses on the reuse of event goods to provide, as they put it, “access to your excess.” While repurposing event goods for community use is better than throwing it away, there’s still the problem of the initial excess. The modern style of wedding involves thousands of flowers, countless decorations, and enough food to feed an army. rEvent’s practices don’t fix this problem and may even encourage it. If a couple feels uncertain about the number of flowers they are buying, they may be reassured of their lavish purchase when they know they will all be put to good use.
They do, however, have one service that is focused on the real problem. In addition to their recycling venture, they offer what the website describes as a “free Sustainable Event Solutions service dedicated to minimizing waste and maximizing local reuse.” This service provides a Senior Event Specialist that will collaborate with event planners and vendors to create a sustainable event design for you. This is the kind of service that is going to make a difference in the future of events. Simply relocating the waste we make is not enough—we need to cut off the waste at its source. If rEvent wants their company to make a real environmental difference, their long term business plan should focus on the sustainable event design aspect of their company.
The problem of waste in the wedding industry may not be so obvious to a bride-and-groom-to-be. Couples decide what flowers to buy and what to put in the center of the tables based on personal taste, not even thinking of what will happen afterwards. rEvent tries to bring this issue to light and give newlyweds an alternative, just maybe not the alternative they were looking for. Their branding sets expectations for an ecofriendly service, when in reality the difference they are making is providing a charitable social service. And while this is a completely respectable goal for a nonprofit company, it’s not what they advertise. The event industry is inherently wasteful and repurposing some decorations doesn’t change that. If we want to make sustainable events, we need to start from the very beginning and not create the waste in the first place. rEvent has an under-advertised service that does just that. While the repurposing plan is a good start while wasteful events are still popular, long term goals for rEvent should include growing the reduced waste planning guides and raising awareness for waste free events. If rEvent wants their company to live up to expectations, they need to focus on making long term, systemic changes in event industry.
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