If you want your wedding to be completely eco-friendly and sustainable you should consider making some green choices to reduce your event’s effect on the environment. The key is to reduce your carbon footprint. Since sustainability is a popular concept, you can easily find green options while planning your wedding.
Here are some tips for your perfect eco-friendly wedding:
- Wedding venue: Choose a venue whose commercial practices are sustainable. For instance, make sure they use local products, they do not use disposable plastic tableware, they implement separate collection correctly, among others.
- Catering: Select caterers who use local products (vegetables, fish, meat and wine) and seasonal cuisine. Also avoid having many leftovers and opt for plated dishes if you can.
- Bride dress and accessories: Get a second-hand wedding dress or rent it. Once you use it you can definitely recycle it or return it. Same apply to the bridal accessories: shoes, jewelry, tiaras, brooches, veil, among others.
- Invitations: choose to send only electronic invitations, do not print them out. E-invitations are easy to create, there are plenty of free online tools you can use on the web and most importantly you can erase this item from your wedding budget, since there will be no expense. If you have to print the invitations you can opt for seed paper which is biodegradable material.
- Name tags & Menu: if you cannot avoid having name tags, a table sitting chart and Menus, try to use recycled paper and eco-friendly inks.
- Wedding favors: you have plenty of green choices here. From seed packets to aromatic herbs kits, from succulents to other plants, from donations to charitable organizations working to protect the environment to sponsoring the planting of a tree. You can also opt for homemade edible products, such as jams, preserves, herbs mix or tea blends, coffee blends. Other options are homemade candles, soaps or shampoo bars.
- Charity registry: you can opt for a charity registry to collect donations for a specific cause instead of receiving the usual wedding presents.
- Flowers: instead of freshly cut flowers you can choose potted plants such as orchids or succulents, or herbs. These options can be reused at home, planted once again. Your guests could bring them home as wedding favors.
These are useful tips if you choose to opt for a green wedding, but remember that planning an eco-friendly wedding is not necessarily more difficult to plan than a less environmentally friendly event.
Looking at the color tones is essential, especially considering the venue you pick. It could be a beach wedding, an outdoor wedding, a hacienda wedding or a wedding in a Hotel ballroom, and there are color schemes that are more suitable for an outdoor wedding than for a wedding hosted in a hotel ballroom for example, so keep this in mind! You can certainly use light colors for your flower centerpiece for an outdoor or a beach wedding, and intense color tones if your wedding will be hosted in a ballroom.
Also remember that the centerpiece plays an important part in your wedding photo session so try to combine it with other colors elements, such as your bouquet, details of your wedding dress, colors of your bridesmaids’dress, etc.
The type of flowers to choose is also another detail you should consider. First of all you should get information on the types of flowers available on that season and in the country you decided to get married. As for Peru I always suggest to brides to opt for Peruvian flowers, which are exotic and very colorful. Brides usually love them!
It´s not necessary to spend a lot of money in flowers, you can have a great result using a lot of greenery for example. This could be a good option if your budget is not so flexible.
Flower vase is another element you should select, this choice is important since this complements how your centerpiece will look like. So consider the size, the color, the material and the decoration. All these details need to be in harmony with the venue and the color palette you chose.
