A lot of work goes into wedding planning. There’s the guest list, choosing a venue, drawing up seating charts, and, of course, the dress. But while you may think you’ve got everything covered, have you thought about the environmental impact of your big day? Here are some great ideas on how to tie the knot in an eco-friendly manner.
It’s no secret that a wedding can be wasteful and produce an extraordinary amount of garbage, carbon dioxide, and greenhouse gases. However, your wedding doesn’t have to be like that. By making greener choices, you can avoid your special day being responsible for producing as much as 400lbs of garbage and 63 tons of CO2.
Top tips to help you reduce the carbon footprint of your wedding while still celebrating your love in style
Choose Your Venue Carefully
The biggest carbon footprint generated by a wedding tends to come from travel. Therefore, try to find a venue that you love that is closer to most of your guests. If guests have to fly in, you can look for ways to offset air travel in other areas. If you’ve always dreamed of having a destination wedding, remember that does mean lots of air travel.
Not to mention, a venue in a remote area will require lots of car travel. While you should get married the way you want, if you feel torn between a few options, take another look at the guest list and perhaps decide which will require fewer plane and car journeys.
Serve A Waste Busting Eco-Friendly Menu
Don’t be tempted to over-cater, as a tenth of all wedding food ends up thrown away. To help avoid unnecessary waste, ask guests about their dietary requirements well before the big day. You could even give your guests the option to choose a smaller portion or skip the start or dessert altogether.
You can also look at your options for composting your wedding trash, whether it’s by the venue or a local business collects the compost for you.
Regardless of who provides the food for your wedding, make sure you know where their ingredients are sourced from. Ideally, opt for locally sourced, seasonal organic food where possible. To really reduce the environmental impact of your wedding meal, you could consider choosing a vegetarian or vegan menu. However, if that’s a little too drastic, aim for a 50% vegetarian menu instead.
Limit Your Wedding Stationery
Wedding stationery inevitably means a lot of paper that will likely end up in the garbage eventually. However, there are ways you can reduce your paper waste. If you are keen to stick with paper invites, ensure your guests can recycle them. That means avoiding using glue, ribbon, glitter, and other embellishments that will stop them from being recyclable.
It’s now possible to print wedding invitations on plantable wildflower seed paper made from recyclable paper containing seeds that guests can plant and grow.
Alternatively, you can do what many eco-conscious couples do and replace paper invitations with e-invites. But this doesn’t mean you have to settle for a boring, plain email. You can email your guests to your wedding website or a video that shows off your wedding theme.
The low down on eco-friendly weddings
If you love the idea of having an eco-friendly wedding, it’s easier than you might think. Switching to greener alternatives such as your wedding location, venue, food, and stationery can help you cut your carbon footprint while still celebrating your love for each other in style.
