Getting Serious About Offsetting Your Green Wedding Carbon Footprint

So, you and your partner have decided that you’re really having a green wedding. You’ve done your research, talked to your green-thinking friends, and you’ve made up your minds that a green wedding is the only way to go. That’s excellent! You’ve taken your first steps along the road to making our battered old world a better place.

Now, one of the first thing to do after you’ve compiled your modestly scaled guest list is to e-mail a request to your attending guests that they find some way to offset their travel. How do they do that? First, they need to find a carbon calculator online then use it figure out how much carbon they’ll generate with their travel. Then, once they know the size of the carbon footprint they’ll generate, they can purchase carbon offsets from various sites such as: https://climatefriendly.com/ or www.GreatestPlanet.org or any of dozens of sites that offer this service. If you can afford it, you can also be proactive and just go ahead and purchase a carbon offset for your entire wedding to save your guests the trouble. If you’re having a wedding that includes, say, 16 guests, which is a reasonable number for a modest green wedding, you can purchase carbon offsets for the entire affair for about $315.00 US dollars. Doing it that way guarantees that you can stage your wedding affair with no guilt pangs, and is the act of a considerate and forward-thinking host. Of course, you can also tell your guests that you’re doing this, and then tender the invitation that they also offset their own travel at their expense. Now that makes for a truly green wedding.

For the wedding itself, you could choose to arrive at the wedding ceremony via a horse-drawn carriage. That is not only an excellent green mode of traveling, it’s also beautiful, picturesque, and doesn’t create any kind of a carbon footprint, although someone will have to clean up the horse poop afterwards. (Oh, well nothing is perfect. In real life, you always have to make some kind of compromise.) Another green wedding tip is to encourage guests to use hybrid or electric vehicles or to carpool. You can also check out green forms of mass transit, such as a limo company that only uses vehicles like a bio-diesel-powered stretch Hummer. If you don’t know where to start there, trying consulting the greenrideglobal.com website for green transportation alternatives in your area.