Environmentally Friendly Weddings: 12 Tips for a Green Wedding

Environmentally friendly blog treehugger writes about all aspects of green living. This post about non-green weddings got us thinking: What would an environmentally friendly wedding look like?

These are the top tips for a green wedding:

1. An environmentally friendly wedding begins with environmentally friendly wedding invites: Print your invitations on recycled paper or, even better, hand-write them. Don’t worry; recycled paper needn’t look horrible – these days it comes in any design or colour you could ask for.
2. Bonus green points for handing the invitations to friends personally. That doesn’t just save you postage, but also the carbon caused by mail.
3. When looking for the perfect wedding location, remember: a green wedding means minimum travel for a maximum of your guests. Your guests will cause less of a carbon footprint and are happy to get to your wedding easily.
4. …as many guests won’t want to travel at the end of the night, make sure there is plenty of affordable accommodation available close by.
5. Finding a green wedding dress is tricky. Your standard wedding dress makers aren’t too concerned with environmentally friendly material and production. There are some wedding dress labels that specialise in green weddings, but you may not be able to find them easily. There is, however, one source of green wedding dresses available to every bride: second hand. You will find plenty of dresses in every style and price category in second hand shops or on ebay. Most second hand wedding dresses are considerably cheaper, others can fetch 4-5-figure sums, if they qualify as “vintage couture”! Whether you save money or splash out, a second hand wedding dress is sure to be environmentally friendly!
6. If you have your heart set on a new wedding dress, try to find one that can be altered to suit other occasions (for example by dyeing or shortening). Or you could sell it and make another bride’s special day a little greener.
7. The biggest waste are unwanted wedding gifts. Your guests spend money on something that ends up gathering dust in your basement. Unwanted gifts are easily avoided with a registry for things you could really use.
8. The wedding decoration is great for green details. For example, cheap paraffin candles contain toxins, bees wax candles, on the other hand, look great and smell lovely!
9. Potted plants instead of flowers. There’s probably no avoiding cut flowers for the bridal bouquet. Potted plants, however, can be taken home and planted in your garden or on a balcony. They will look beautiful for several months or years, as opposed to cut flowers that get thrown out the next day.
10. Paper place cards? Why not try and find original uses for natural materials or “junk” reclaimed as place cards? You could make place cards out of champagne corks, sea shells or chestnuts? Or write the names of your guests on something edible, like cupcakes. Just use your imagination and create an imaginative alternative to non environmentally friendly place cards.
11. Organic food (ideally vegetarian) and organic wine grown locally makes your wedding very environmentally friendly. Not only are you cutting out pesticides and chemical additives, the carbon footprint of the food miles isn’t larger than necessary.
12. Speaking of food – there’s always leftovers, but make sure they don’t just get thrown out!
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Tags: environment, green, marriage, weddings