Weddings Are Wasteful

Your wedding is your most special day. It is a celebration of love and new beginnings surrounded by your closest friends and family. However, dream weddings often come at a hefty price – not just to you, but to the environment as well.

According to The Green Bride Guide, the average wedding produces between 400 and 600 pounds of waste for every 100 to 120 people. Per year, this totals to about a billion pounds of trash. And if that isn’t shocking enough, it doesn’t even begin to include the 63 tons of carbon dioxide produced per wedding.

With stats like that, executing your dream wedding without causing consequential damage to the environment sounds nearly impossible. But with a little research, we figured out it’s quite the opposite.

Therefore, we’ve compiled five extremely easy tips to plan that wedding you’ve always wanted, while remaining eco-conscious and eco-friendly.

Reconsider Your Dress

Have you thought about what you’d do with your wedding dress after the wedding? Like many other brides, it is possible you may actually never wear your dress again.

Instead of setting yourself up to struggle with ways to re-purpose your dress post-wedding, do your future self a favor and avoid it altogether. You could use one of many successful companies to actually rent your wedding dress. One of our current favorites is Wedding Dress For Rent, which features three-day rentals for all budgets and all styles—some even as low as $100. It could cost as low as $33 to wear your dream wedding dress on your special day—all while affording the environment some useful resources, too.

If renting a dress isn’t your thing, you could consider buying a more sustainable dress overall. Brands such as Reformation, or Mother of Pearl, have a plethora of styles available for sale, while remaining ethically and environmentally conscious. Both of these brands understand the impact that fashion has on the environment, and they take several approaches to sustainability that are worth exploring. Reformation, for example, calculates the amount of waste of every product available for sale on their site, including carbon emissions and water waste. They then display it on each product’s page. This helps you make educated and empowered choices when it comes to purchasing their garments. Likewise, Mother of Pearl claims that only 5% of all the fibers they use are synthetic and are slowly in the process of phasing them out completely. The rest of their fabrics are organic, natural materials, such as cotton or silk. These materials are biodegradable, so they reduce both water waste and micro plastics that eventually end up in oceans.

Give Your Stationary the Gift of Life

Invitations, save-the-dates, programs and menus require plenty of paper, ink and other resources to print. However, it’s not impossible to maintain a high standard of quality in your stationary, while also being kind to our planet. Some companies, such as Paper Culture, make it their mission to only sell planet friendly stationary made from 100% recycled paper. Or, you could take it a step further and use Botanical Paper Works, which makes plantable wedding invitations made from seed paper. They result in zero waste, decompose, and if planted as intended, will eventually grow into wildflowers. The act of planting your wedding stationary could be a beautiful bonding experience for both you and your partner. Watching this seed paper eventually blossom into wildflowers would be a responsible and quite powerful way to honor both your wedding and the planet.

Be a Showoff!

In an effort to maintain a sustainable approach to your wedding, consider asking your guests not to wrap your wedding gifts. If you really think about it, it’s almost impossible to really save wrapping paper anyway, isn’t it? If it will eventually end in the trash, maybe it would be best to save your guests and yourself the trouble at all! You could take things a step further and ensure that your registry contains mostly sustainable and local items. Another approach? This one is a bit unconventional—but consider having guests donate funds to your wedding instead of bringing any gifts at all. Not only will this save you space at the venue, but can also be easily done online. Websites, such as Zora, encourage registries, while also offering guidance on setting up cash funds for things, such as experiences while traveling or honeymoon expenses.

Go Local

When looking for vendors, caterers and florists, you can lower your carbon footprint significantly by shopping in-season and locally. This applies to alcohol, as well. Local wineries and breweries may not only be more affordable, but will by far be more sustainable, as well.

(Bonus tip: Consider opting out of bottles and cans entirely when it comes to alcohol, and try getting kegs instead! Not only is this much more fun, but you’ll do your part in preventing 370 billion additional metal drink cans from ending up in a landfill)

Why Not Recycle?

Table centerpieces and other decorations for a wedding are an important part of every wedding's theme. However, they can be quite wasteful. Decorations for your wedding could be approached much more differently than what we’re often used to. Instead of purchasing brand new items, try hitting up your local thrift or vintage stores to find some statement pieces. You can browse online for items easy to DIY into beautiful pieces for your wedding. And keep in mind-- there are no rules to this game. It is YOUR wedding. Meaning, your pieces can all be part of the theme without being identical matches.

If you hate the idea of thrifting for some centerpieces, try buying items you may be able to actually re-use when you get back home. If there’s too many centerpieces for you to take home, you could even share them with guests. Useful centerpieces that could be reused at home are things like vases, bowls or mason jars. You want things that you know will be of good use to you and your family. The point is to ensure you use centerpieces that you and your guests could eventually re-purpose, instead of just discarding them and adding to our already explosive trash and landfill problem.

We hope that you’ve found some useful information here that encourages you to take a step toward a more sustainable approach to your wedding. With 2.5 million weddings happening every year, it is really important that we take even the smallest steps to prevent the substantial damage that our weddings can bring about. You shouldn’t, however, have to sacrifice your wedding’s quality in order to do so. With the steps taken here, we’re confident that you’ll be able to find the perfect balance between sustainability and a dream wedding.