Your Green Wedding: How to Plan an Eco-Friendly Celebration

Today, environmentally conscious couples are making great strides in reducing their impact, or “carbon footprint” as it’s often called, on the planet by having green weddings. Donate and recycle are two words to keep in the forefront of your mind when planning your own green wedding, and by using a little creativity, you can have a beautiful wedding that’s style conscious as well as eco-friendly.

Green Alternatives to Wedding Flowers

One trend that’s rapidly gaining in popularity is completely flower-free bouquets for the bride as well as the bridesmaids. Use decorative fans or tiny purses embellished with jewels and fabrics for the maids to carry down the aisle. If you can’t find something suitable for your wedding’s theme or your personal tastes, opt for faux flowers to create bouquets that will be lasting and cherished keepsakes for the members of your bridal party.

Green Wedding Invitations

While it’s true wedding invitations do need to contain a lot of pertinent information for guests, there are still many ways of minimizing the amount of paper used. Instead of using a different card for each thing, combine the details on one sheet of paper, or better yet, set up a website where guests can log on and view all of the details, just be sure to remember those people who won’t have internet access.

For the bachelorette party or the rehearsal dinner, use online invitations whenever possible, and, when printing your own wedding invitations, choose vegetable or soy based inks, or find a commercial printer who uses them, and always use recycled paper.

Green Wedding Receptions

Choosing a site for your reception is one of the very most important aspects of planning the entire wedding, and even more so when having an eco-friendly celebration. Two ideas for considering are choosing a site that will either benefit from your wedding in some way, or one that is located out of doors. For the former, places such as historic homes or estates, museums and art galleries will greatly benefit from the fee paid to use their site.

Or, if you want to have an outdoor event, botanical and organic gardens, arboretums or even on the grounds of one of those historic estates would serve as a wonderful backdrop.

Light soy candles at the reception instead of the regular kind and you’ll not only be saving energy but you’ll be using a renewable resource that burns for far longer and doesn’t create the usual waxy mess. Also, candlelight is a must have for weddings as it’s romantic and sets the mood for the day perfectly and soy candles are now available in just about every color, size, shape, style, and scent that you could think of.

Bamboo is the perfect medium to use for decorating for a green wedding as this particular type of plant life is perhaps one of the most sustainable materials known to man on earth today. In a short three to seven years, most species of bamboo will be completely mature, as opposed to the whopping 120 years it takes for an oak tree to reach the same maturity.

Bamboo can be used in the centerpieces as well as for the placemats, and what better eco-friendly wedding favors to pass out to your guests than miniature stalks of lucky bamboo placed in pretty, decorative containers?

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