Five Ways to Make Your Wedding Greener

By: Alexine

With the environment and conservation on the headlines these days it is no wonder people are becoming more interested in getting green. This is especially hard when planning your wedding due to the fact that most companies produce waste before they even get to your wedding. When you hire a company to do the work based on their prices and sample performances, most of us don’t ask about how green the company is. Due to the push for “going green” today I’ve come up with five parts of the wedding that you can make green.

Recycled Paper Products
When choosing the type of set the date cards and invitations to send out use recycled paper. There are a lot of beautiful designs and imprints you can get made of recycled paper. This will require you to make the invitations yourself, but it can be fun. Get your girl friends together for ladies night to help you put them together. This will give you an excuse to spend time with friends and also be green with the paper products you use.

Reusable Dishes and Linens
When choosing a caterer make sure they use glass dishes, glasses, stainless steel flatware and washable linens. This way you can ensure that your wedding is not producing garbage from the plastic utensils and dishes. When reusable items are used the only waste is the water to wash them when they are finished being used. That is a nice relief and allows the company to use them on multiple weddings which can put you at peace of mind in the sense of having to accommodate for lots of people.

Stay Local
Another great way to have a greener wedding is to keep the traveling to a minimum. In most cases this would be to have it where you and your family live. However, some of us live far away from the majority of our families. In this case having the wedding where the majority of people are keeps down the traveling, even if it means you have to travel. I know it may seem like a headache, but then more people can attend without flying on an airplane or wasting lots of gas driving cross country.

Carpool
Traveling in a carpool is a great way to save on gas and get people to the wedding. If you ask them to carpool they can also assign a designated driver which keeps people from drinking and driving as well. This would eliminate having to call cabs and figuring out what to do with vehicles. All in all the carpooling idea helps in a few areas and is a greener way to get to the wedding.

Catering Food
Try to find a caterer that uses locally grown food. By using local food you eliminate the global transportation of the goods that uses lots of fossil fuels. Unfortunately this would be more for summer and fall weddings in the areas that have all four seasons. However, if you plan a wedding during the harvesting seasons the locally grown food would be fresh and that ensures very tasty food. If you go to your local farmers market you may meet some people that know of caterers that use their produce or other local produce. It’s always worth a try if you have a little time to check it out and see what is available.

Hopefully these ideas gave you a little inspiration to try and make your wedding a little more green. If you are able to do one, two or three things, that’s great. With all the talk about being more environmentally friendly today, remember that even one change at your wedding helps with limiting waste.