Green wedding 1

Shakespeare Garden, Central Park

Green wedding? Buy Carbon offsets for your wedding from this site:
Terrapass.com. We've updated the list with other choices in #9, below.
Here are 10 questions to shape your thinking about green weddings - from tree-hugger.com


1. Watch the numbers
.. each person you invite means more miles traveled, more food consumed, a bigger venue, and more waste when it’s all over...invite as many loved ones as you want, but keep an eye on the numbers and be aware that the more the guest list grows, the harder it is to draw the line...

2. Source locally
...some things are more important than others. Food and drinks are a great place to start. If there’s a good micro-brewery down the road, why truck in a keg of your favorite organic ale? .. Flowers are also worth sourcing locally. Try community gardens.

3. Source green
Everything you buy or rent for your wedding will have an environmental and social impact... Can you encourage caterers to use organic produce? What is your dress made of? How was the gold in the rings mined? Did those tasty little gift bags of chocolate involve slave labor? Even if you can’t establish the green credentials of every single supplier, at least by asking questions about such issues you are already making a difference. Remember though, what is green may not always be obvious — while a hemp suit may be a good eco-statement, if it is going to sit in the closet for most of your married life, you could be much better off with a traditional rental service. Similarly, party rentals for linens and glasses are a classic example of a product service system — They provide the perfect means for getting the most use out of minimal resources.

4. Pick your venue
Choosing a location that is as close to as many of your guests as possible will reduce your wedding’s impact in a big way... why not consider supporting your local community garden, farmer --or other worthwhile project? (This TreeHugger and his soon to be treehugging wife will be tying the knot at Celebrity Dairy, a local low-impact dairy farm in North Carolina that, conveniently, does excellent green-minded catering). Not only will your wedding serve as a useful source of revenue for the chosen local hosts, it can also raise awareness of their work and send a strongly personal message about the issues that you and your partner care about.

5. Greening transportation
Try to provide as much information on transport options as possible - train, bus, bike, or at least by carpool... Pictures of the happy couple arriving on a Christiania Bike or G-Wiz electric car will preserve the eco-propaganda value of your wedding for some time to come.

6. Make it personal
Why not ask friends to grow and bring flowers? You’ll end up with the most fabulous flower (un)arrangements ever seen, why not create a scrap book to which friends and relatives can add poems, drawings, pictures, or anecdotes. These are the things that most folks remember most fondly—not the chocolate fountain or the cut-glass chandeliers.

7. The perfect eco-invites
..There is an increasing number of suppliers of recycled, handmade, or tree-free invitations out there - If you are happy breaking from tradition, then electronic invites like Evites are worth considering, too.

8. Gifts of conscience
There are almost too many retailers of green gifts to mention these days, and many offer registry services. So why not ask for that solar cooker you’ve always wanted? ... Many local craft stores may also do registries, and even mainstream retailers now have many eco-options, such as organic linens, etc. Remember though, less is almost always more when it comes to being green ... think carefully about how many bamboo yoga mats you really want or need. If you have all you need, why not create an online donation registry to a worthy cause instead?

9. Offsetting the rest
Popular choices include Terrapass, Native Energy, and MyClimate in the US, planetair in Canada, (good international info and calculators at The David Suzuki Foundation and Climate Care in Europe. Native Energy even has an online wedding offset calculator. If you can’t afford offsets for the whole wedding, then why not offset a portion and ask guests to contribute to the rest? You can at least include information on offset providers on the invites so guests can choose whether to offset their travel. Be aware though, that some see offsetting as fundamentally flawed, no matter which provider you choose — so make sure it fits with your version of what’s green.

10. Communicate
Tell guests about yourselves and about what is important to you. If you can create a wonderful, magical celebration that treads a little lighter on the planet, then people will remember it. Too many folks still believe environmentalism is all doom and gloom — this is the perfect opportunity to prove them wrong!"