Some Easy Options for Staging the Ultimate Earth Friendly Wedding

If you’re thinking of staging an earth friendly wedding you’ve probably already figured out that you need to ban disposable products from your wedding plans, so that means no plastic silverware, cups, disposable napkins, etc. So where does that leave you if you still want to plan a beautiful, comfortable and elegant wedding. Well, for starters, you need to think about renting or borrowing whatever you need to stage your wedding. Employing reusable materials like metal silverware, ceramic plates, cloth napkins and tablecloths, folding banquet tables, metal or wood candelabras, glass vases for flowers and so on. Renting everything may not be the cheapest way to stage your earth friendly wedding and its accompanying reception, but it’s certainly one of the most intelligent ways to solve a variety of problems. Remember, rental companies are in the business of supplying plates, silverware, glasses, napkins and so for a variety of different types of events, so you should have no problem finding place settings, linens and everything else you need to fit the theme you’re establishing for your wedding, no matter how simple or elaborate you want it to be. Of course, for an earth friendly wedding I recommend simplicity in all things. Big, elaborate, ornate weddings are wasteful and selfish and need to be relegated to the past, just like leisure suits, disco music, and non-recyclable materials.

So, rent or borrow whatever you can. Employ reusable materials like metal silverware and crystal glasses that can be used for your wedding and then cleaned and reused again and again. Plan what you will do with any leftover food. I think it’s a great idea to have it packaged up and distributed to the homeless in your area, or send it to a food pantry or soup kitchen near where you live so it won’t have to travel very far.

Another aspect of your earth friendly wedding is to buy local. This is not only socially responsible it’s good for the economy in whatever area where you live. It’s also the most earth friendly way to get the food, flowers, wine, and other consumables you’ll need for your wedding. The farther anything has to travel by air, rail, truck or car, the larger its carbon footprint. And since the whole goal of staging an earth friendly wedding is to create as small a carbon footprint as possible, then it only makes sense to buy local produce, local flowers, and even locally-produced wedding candles. Getting your candles made by a vendor who’s local makes sense in other ways, too, since you’re more likely to get candles that are designed and manufactured to match a particular theme or color scheme that you’ve planned for your wedding.

Use Digital Cameras to Make Your Wedding Pictures Green

It’s a fun custom at modern weddings to put a disposable camera on every table at the reception and allow the guests to snap away. The disposable cameras are then collected at the end of the wedding reception and sent off to have the photos developed. As I said, it’s great fun, and many, many couples have acquired a wonderful and utterly unique record of the wedding reception from this approach. However, using disposable anything is a terrible idea, and I hope that this is a custom that will die out.

Did you know that the United States, all by itself, uses over 24 million disposable cameras? That’s enough to create a small mountain of non-biodegradable waste. So, banish all thoughts of using disposable cameras and instead, go digital. Because of the expense of digital cameras it may not be practical or even possible to put a digital camera on every table at the reception. But who says you need a camera on every table. Why not borrow a nice selection of digital cameras, say half a dozen or so, and leave them at strategic locations throughout your wedding reception venue? That way, you can still have a variety of people taking photos throughout the reception and you’ll probably wind up with a great sampling of wedding pictures of your nearest and dearest partying and carrying on at the reception.

Another plus about using digital cameras is that you’re spared the expense of developing every photo, even the ones you might not want, like the ones drunken cousin Ernie took of his own butt after he’d had one too many wedding toasts. With digital photos it’s easy to delete the inappropriate images, the bad ones, and anything that’s blurry, out-of-focus or looks too dark.

And let’s face it; the photos you get from disposable cameras are frequently pretty lousy. They’re grainy, they’re out of focus and the colors are garish. Plus, you have to consider the environmental cost of developing photos. The chemicals used to develop conventional film aren’t exactly good for the environment. When you go digital, you’re bypassing a lot of the garbage that gets pumped into the environment from conventional photo developing. If you have the right kind of inkjet printer, you can buy photo paper and print your own photos at home, which costs a whole lot less than sending pictures out to be developed and is a whole lot better for the environment as well. So go digital and make your wedding photos as green as your wedding menu, your venue, and your trousseau.