Little Ideas to Keep Your Wedding Green

We’re not necessarily advocating that you go totally green with your wedding – that’s up to you – but there are neat little ways in which you can give a thumbs-up to the environment and manage to contribute just a little less plastic somethings to landfill:

Despite the trend to faux flowers this year and next, live floral arrangements are surely the way to go if it means that you can plant them in the ground after the wedding? You could even make one per table a gift to someone at each table to take home
Use recycled wedding invitations – they’re the hot new thing. One example of this is plantable paper in which are mixed flower seeds
Use your place cards as wedding favours, for example imagine if you hand-painted a series of thrift store plates – your guests get to eat their meal thereon, and take home with them afterwards
Wear a vintage wedding gown – go on, you know you want to, and with Victorian lace and romance making a re-appearance, a family heirloom or a gorgeous wedding dress bought second-hand is just the ticket
Transport – encourage your guests to carpool, bike or even walk to the wedding venue; it helps if you’ve chosen an accessible one. Those from out of town you can point in the direction of hybrid car rental, and for the reception you can take a leaf out of William and Kate’s wedding and hire a double-decker bus to take everyone there
Gifts to charity – if you’ve already got everything you need to set up house, you could ask your guests to donate to a charity of your choice. Some online wedding registries donate a portion of their sales to charity, if you really need the bath towels
Left-overs to a shelter – even Woolworths donates their beyond their sellby date food to a food bank, you could do the same
Local and organic – as much as possible, choose a menu that will use local food and ingredients bought from local markets and farmers, that is both seasonal and preferably organic