Wedding Planning|Wedding Planning & Wedding Advice

There’s no reason you can’t be green and glam on your wedding day.  Green weddings are quickly gaining popularity, and although some brides and grooms spend gobs of money on theirs, you don’t have to.  Here are 7 ways to green your wedding that really make a difference on the earth and your wallet.

1. Buy rings responsibly.  This can mean one of two things: buy vintage or buy new eco-friendly.  Going vintage keeps what’s already in existence in circulation so there’s no waste.  It’s also romantic to think the band around your finger has a history of love.  If buying new, insist on a retailer who is a proponent of eco-friendly jewelry, such as greenKarat (they’re surprisingly competitively priced).  We all know about blood diamonds by now, but conventional gold mining destroys land and poisons the environment by employing the use of cyanide and mercury.
2. Get local food, flowers, and wine from the farmers’ market.  Talk to vendors about your green wedding—they’ll be happy for your business as well as your eco-initiative.  Also, most of America’s cut flowers come from Columbia, which produces a lot of CO2 just for a few bouquets of roses.  Buy seasonal, organic flowers from local growers.  Although local wine is hard to come by, at least try to stick to nationally made and organic varieties.
3. Donate leftover food to the homeless shelter or soup kitchen.  There’s no reason all those lovely dishes should go to waste.
4. Consider investing in a pre-loved wedding dress to save raw and shipping resources.  Brides Against Breast Cancer tours the nation every year selling gently used dresses.  Sales benefit educational programs and wish grant funds for Making Memories Breast Cancer Foundation.  Donate your dress to their cause after the ceremony.  If you’re set on buying new, try to look for fairly traded and organic fabrics.
5. Limit your paper usage by sending e-vites (which are free) or invitations made of post-consumer recycled paper printed in vegetable-based inks.  Check out Green Paper Company for pretty invitations.
6. When you’ve got a final list of attendees to your bid day, visit Terra Pass.  They have a wedding carbon footprint calculator based on your answers to just six simple questions including, How many guests are taking short flights?
7. Skip Hawaii and consider an eco-tourist honeymoon, wherein you travel to unconventional (read: cheap) destinations to not only enjoy the sights but also do some good for the local populace, environment, and critters, too.  Check out Clean Breaks by Jeremy Smith and Richard Hammond, who offer 500 new ways to see the world and do some good, including traipsing around with rhinos at Leshiba or picking papayas in Sri Lanka.

Bio: Alexis Bonari is currently a resident blogger at College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching field hockey scholarship programs as well as sickle cell scholarship programs. Whenever this WAHM gets some free time she enjoys doing yoga, cooking with the freshest organic in-season fare, and practicing the art of coupon clipping.

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