Yes, Weddings Can Be Green!

There is nothing quite as special as planning your wedding. Elegant gowns, elaborate flower arrangements, limos, fancy foods and party favors are wonderful, but expensive and create a lot of waste, clearly impacting your carbon footprint.  A green wedding is just as lovely, and perhaps even more unique.  What makes a wedding green?

Choosing an outdoor venue is an obvious start.    A farm, the beach, a botanical garden or arboretum, your family’s back yard are all green options, and even greener if your wedding is during the day when you don’t need electricity.  If you prefer an indoor wedding, choose a green hotel with an environmental mission.

I know evites are super green, but I prefer traditional invitations which can also be eco-friendly.  Paper companies offer some clever, green papers beyond recycled such as paper made from made from cotton, bamboo, grass clippings, even recycled blue jeans, and they are beautiful!   Some papers even have plantable seeds imbedded in them.  Your guests will always remember your special day as they watch a plant grow from the invitation seeds.  Check out these tree free eco-invitations!

Choose locally grown, in season flowers instead of imported ones, which are usually heavily sprayed with chemicals and grown under horrible working conditions.  If there are some exotic flowers you want, make sure they are VeriFlora certified sustainably grown ones.  Potted plants or even edible arrangements make lovely and unusual centerpieces.  

Consider hiring a caterer who specializes in locally grown, seasonal foods.  Local food is fresher, has a much smaller carbon footprint and is more delicious.

Most girls dream of the perfect wedding dress.  A more eco-friendly and economical option to an expensive designer dress worn only once is a vintage or a pre-worn dress. Restructuring a family wedding dress into your style and taste is always a lovely tribute to a family heirloom and definitely a green choice. There are some socially conscious designers who use natural fabrics like silk or cotton.

Being green doesn’t necessarily mean giving anything up – it means being aware and going with a more sustainable alternative.

Information compiled from greenweddings.com

 

ECO-FRIENDLY DRESSING

Now that you recycle, conserve water and electricity, and eat organic food, have you thought about what you wear?

Cotton is labeled the world’s “dirtiest” crop because of its heavy usage of insecticides, the most hazardous pesticide. Cotton covers 2.5% of the world’s cultivated land and uses 16% of the world’s insecticides, more than any other single major crop.  Several of these insecticides are considered acutely hazardous to human health by the World Health Organization, and affect wildlife and ecosystems as well.  The majority of the world’s cotton farmers are in developing countries where children, who are more vulnerable to the toxic effects of chemicals, the poor and uneducated work in the fields.

Image by Jankie Flickr.com

Projects are underway to help farmers change from chemically-dependent growing to sustainable growing, using more biologically-based and organic farming practices.  Cleaner Cotton™ uses up to 73 percent fewer chemical inputs than conventional cotton.  These changes benefit the grower and the environment with fewer chemicals ending up in the soil, the air and the water supply.  Organic cotton protects the wearer too and is becoming more prevalent.

Other options for natural fabrics include wool, silk, linen, hemp, ramie and jute.  Wearing and doing creative things with vintage clothes and fabrics is popular now.

Image by Amy Wild

My artist daughter buys clothes from second hand and vintage stores and restructures them into today’s styles.  She also appliqués antique doilies onto t-shirts, an adorable and great way to reuse vintage fabrics.  (www.wheredesigns.com).

In addition to the environmental and health concerns, there is also the issue of sweatshop labor with hazardous working conditions, exploitation, low wages, and lack of basic human rights.  The next time you go shopping, think about buying vintage clothes or natural fabrics.  The cost of buying less expensive clothes comes with a hidden price.  By voting with our pocketbooks, we can make positive changes in the world.

Cotton information compiled from a 2007 report from the Environmental Justice Foundation with Pesticide Action Network, UK.