Sustainable Weddings

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending my Niece's wedding. My niece and her husband are extremely environmentally conscience, and they wanted to see how "green" friendly they could manage with their wedding, leaving as small a foot print as possible.

The first thing that they did was to use Vimeo to create an e-video for their save the date. Of course this was then disseminated to their friends and family via email, leaving no environmental footprint in their path, and they saved money as well. No paper, no printing, no postage.

Now comes the invitations. Again, turning to the internet, they produced a beautiful e-vite, along with a "response card" to maintain their goal of being completely sustainable in their approach. The invitations were beautiful, and I've found that there are a multitude of sites on the web that may be used for sending out these invitations via email, some free, some for a small fee, but this too saves on paper and postage, leaving no footprint.

I wondered how they were going to maintain this lofty goal of zero impact on the environment with their actual wedding, which did turn out to be a bit harder, but still, I was amazed at the extent to which they worked this out.

The arrived and left their wedding on bicycle, no pollution, no impact.
The wedding dress was made in a fashion that it could later be dyed and hemmed to wear in the future. This has a small impact on the environment, but no more than any other clothing that you would purchase normally.

The food that was served was all vegetarian, and delicious, but this didn't impress me as being sustainable, until I found out that all of the produce was grown locally, only organic produce, much of it by the chef him self, and used in preparation of all of the meals. No shipping, cartage, etc, no fuel used to transport, just good quality, organic (no pesticide) vegetables. They even served fruit smoothies made with locally grown organic apples. What a wonderful idea!!

The Flowers were all locally grown, in season flowers, which were beautiful, and again kept the environment footprint very small. In addition to this, the vases that were used were ball jars that will be re-used again and again as my niece loves to make canned fruits and vegetables.

Ok, so I guess you’re wondering how we can bring the jewelry into the idea of sustainability. Easy, the rings that were used were family heirlooms, re-worked to fit their taste!!

All in all, this was quite an impressive wedding and quite an impressive feat to accomplish such a small environmental footprint with 150 people at the wedding!