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A company found the best way to get the most from your wedding bouquet.

Flowers at weddings are beautiful — but their beauty doesn't have to end there.

Love may last forever, but flowers don't — especially at weddings.

Back when she worked as an event planner, Jennifer Grove oversaw countless weddings. And besides brides, grooms, cake, ushers, bridesmaids, and attendees, there was something else that played a huge role in many of those weddings: flowers; lots and lots of flowers. Flowers that, sadly, wouldn't last much longer than the reception.

"I would have to tell people, 'Yep, you can throw all those flowers out,'" Grove tells Upworthy in a new video. There had to be a better solution than just throwing out perfectly good flowers, and that's what led Grove to start Repeat Roses.



Grove arranges flowers into small bundles. All photos by Jess Blank/Upworthy.

Repeat Roses helps place gently used flowers in the hands of those who might need a little beauty in their lives. Specifically, to people living in hospitals and nursing homes.

During the wedding-planning process, spouses-to-be call up Repeat Roses, letting the company know they'd like to donate their wedding flowers. Repeat Roses then stops by the wedding at the end of the evening, gathers up the flowers, breaks them into small arrangements, and delivers them to a hospital, hospice facility, shelter, or nursing home.


Each year, in the U.S., there are roughly 2.25 million weddings. Each of those weddings generates between 400-600 pounds of trash.

That's a lot of trash, and that's a LOT of flowers that just get thrown away. Another part of what Repeat Roses does is reclaim the flowers after a few days at the hospitals or care centers so they can be composted, eliminating as much waste as possible.

"Our goal is to make it easy to incorporate an eco-friendly element to any corporate event or wedding plan while making a positive social impact," says Grove. "It's a lot of work, but it's a very unique opportunity combining kindness and sustainability in one service — giving back to the community and giving back to nature."


Now, of course, some soon-to-be newlyweds are cutting flowers out altogether in an effort to be less wasteful.

A quick look online for wedding flower alternatives will turn up a lot of really interesting, creative options being embraced by non-traditionalists out there. For example, candles have become a popular flower alternative, as have bundles of sticks or feathers.

Still, if you're going to stick to the flower tradition, you might as well donate your used flowers to others in need. It's a true act of charity, and that's exactly how Grove describes it.

"With newlyweds, it's the first charitable act they've done, and they haven't even left for their honeymoon yet," she says.


Learn more about how Repeat Roses is helping give flowers a second chance at bringing joy into someone's life in the Upworthy Original video below.

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ACUVUE launches a new campaign to inspire Gen Z to put down their phones and follow their vision

What will you create on your social media break? Share it at #MyVisionMySight.

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If you’ve always lived in a world with social media, it can be tough to truly understand how it affects your life. One of the best ways to grasp its impact is to take a break to see what life is like without being tethered to your phone and distracted by a constant stream of notifications.

Knowing when to disconnect is becoming increasingly important as younger people are becoming aware of the adverse effects screen time can have on their eyes. According to Eyesafe Nielsen, adults are now spending 13-plus hours a day on their digital devices, a 35% increase from 2019.1. Many of us now spend more time staring at screens on a given day than we do sleeping which can impact our eye health.

Normally, you blink around 15 times per minute, however, focusing your eyes on computer screens or other digital displays have been shown to reduce your blink rate by up to 60%.2 Reduced blinking can destabilize your eyes’ tear film, causing dry, tired eyes and blurred vision.3

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The video posted by Ohio mom, Karlie Smith (unbreakablemomma on TikTok), has received nearly 600,000 views and has over 1,850 comments.

“Call me cheap, call me whatever, but if we’re going out to a restaurant, I’m packing my kid a meal," Smith, 21, said in her post. "I do this for many reasons. On Friday nights, my family and I get together, and tonight, we’re getting food out. My son is not getting food out.”

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Man rewatches shows from his childhood and his recaps of the bonkers storylines are priceless

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@hearthrobert/TikTok

These plots makes zero sense.

While there are no doubt some timeless classics from our childhood that remain every bit as amazing as we remember, many are straight-up cringey upon a later viewing. Really, it’s to be expected as societal viewpoints change…sort of a marker of how far we’ve collectively come.

And so, what do we do with these problematic pieces of old-school pop culture? Well, we can certainly update them to better reflect a more modern attitude, but that also comes with a set of potential problems. Or we could simply never watch them again. Certainly an option given all the content out there. But then we might miss an opportunity to better understand what seemed to work for the mainstream then, and why it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the third option—allow ourselves to be entertained by their cringiness.

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Woman decides that she is the love of her life and marries herself at her retirement home

“I said, you know what, I’ve done everything else. Why not?”

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We joke about marrying ourselves or a platonic friend if some arbitrary amount of time has passed without a proposal from an imaginary suitor. And sure, some people do wind up marrying a friend in more of a business arrangement, but it's not very common that someone follows through with marrying themselves.

Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.

On a beautiful May day, friends and family gathered in the O’Bannon Terrace Retirement Community, where Fideli is a resident, to witness the ceremony.

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12-year-old Texas girl saves her family from carbon monoxide poisoning

She knew something was wrong with her mom and brother, which wound up saving her whole family.

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A little girl in Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a terrifying encounter with the deadly gas, but her quick actions saved her entire family. Jaziyah Parker is being held up as a hero after she realized something was wrong with her family members and called for help.

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Barrymore has consistently starred in hit films and movies that are rewatchable cable-TV staples, such as “Charlie's Angels” (2000), “Never Been Kissed” (1999), “Scream” (1996), “The Wedding Singer” (1998), “50 First Dates” (2004) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).

Now, she’s an even more significant part of people’s lives as the host of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” which runs every weekday on CBS. So far, the show has been a big success, attracting an average of 1.21 million views per show, and ranks as the #4 talk show in syndication. It was recently renewed through the 2024 season.

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