Melanie was raised to respect the Earth. She remembers recycling before people did that sort of thing.
As an undergrad at Brigham Young University, she started an environmental awareness group to focus on recycling, using knowledge and experience gained in high school.
So it came as no surprise that when Melanie, 31, and her fiance started planning their June 26 wedding, they wanted to make it as Earth-friendly as possible.
That was easy when it came to designing their wedding invitations -- using recycled paper --and picking out her wedding dress -- made of all-natural fibers. But when it came to planning the reception for as many as 300 at her parents' home, the couple ran into environmentally unfriendly obstacles.
"We were sitting on the couch at Christmas, trying to figure out how we were going to afford all this wedding stuff, and how to do it with as little waste as possible," she explained. "I refused to use paper plates for the reception -- that'd be too much waste. But we found that renting table settings would cost between $ 5 and $ 11 per person."
That's when the epiphany struck.
If the couple could collect 300 donated dinner plates, salad plates, bowls, coffee cups, glasses, knives, forks and spoons to use at their reception, they could later make the collection available to others with similar needs.
When deciding which group could make the best use of the collection, Melanie said she thought back to the place where she learned "that it's wrong to use paper plates.".
"It was back in high school with the SAVE (Students Against Violating the Earth) group at her former high school. So I typed a letter to them in January with the proposal, and they agreed, and we just kind of hashed it out from there."
What SAVE and the couple came up with is a plan that has the group working to collect as many place settings as it can before the June nuptials, in exchange for the group's use of the collection for future fund-raising.
The SAVE members have volunteered to wash the eclectic collection of dishes following the couple's reception and return them to the SAVE House, where they will be stored and available to anyone in the community for a nominal fee.
"My fiance and I both work with students, so it wasn't unusual to think how we could get kids involved and make it a charitable event that would help us now and other people later," Brewer said.
And this way, we can give back as much as they're giving us. We'll make a donation to their organization, and they can use the plates again for future fund-raisers."
In the midst of the hundreds of details and decisions brought on by a wedding, Melanie seems unfazed by the daunting task of overseeing the collection of 300 sets of table settings, glasses and silverware.
But, she said,, it's no harder and no less important than the other tasks that remain: making tablecloths that can be reused, choosing plants and small trees as centerpieces so wedding guests can plant the decor when they leave, and living happily -- and greenly -- ever after.
