I confess: my secret vice is reading celebrity wedding news. So naturally I read voraciously all the news reports on Chelsea Clinton’s wedding last weekend to Marc Mezvinsky, spending several precious moments examining the ruffles on her gorgeous Vera Wang wedding gown. But I’m also a keen environmentalist, so I was eager to read of any green innovations that the happy couple may have incorporated into their celebration. All I learned was that the bride is a vegan and that the wedding cake was gluten free. Still, in the spirit of nuptial bliss and love for planet Earth, here are some of my favorite recent green wedding stories:
Grow Your Own Wedding: Julia Davis and her fiance, Andy McLeod, are growing virtually all of the food that will be served at their September 25 wedding. And they have convinced their family and friends to help them transform their home-grown produce into a sumptuous wedding dinner. The Maine couple has planted onions, potatoes, pumpkins, butternut and Blue Ballet hubbard squash, beets, corn, dill, lettuce, and at least five different kinds of tomatoes, fertilizing the crops with goat manure scavenged from a nearby goat farm. They are also raising their own chickens, which will be served roasted with squash soup, oven fries and cubed Hubbard squash with kale. As the bride’s mother wrote on the couple’s blog, A Local Food Wedding, from Seed to Plate, “May their marriage grow easily in any soil, tolerate dry weather and some frost, bloom prolifically, and be everlasting.”
Grow Your Own Wedding Tree: As part of a reforestation program in Indonesia’s West Java province, couples tying the knot are now required by law to plant trees. As part of an environmental program called “Couples Caring for the Environment,” each man and woman who wed must plant and care for five trees. Usually the bridegroom presents the seedlings to the bride as a dowry and they plant them during the ceremony, dirt be damned. According to environmentalists, destruction of Indonesia’s forests for agriculture has made the vast island nation the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
Green Your Own Muslim Wedding (or any wedding): Eco-Muslim activist Rianne ten Veen offers some tips for making Muslim weddings eco friendly. For example, arrange beforehand with a homeless charity to take any leftover food from the wedding banquet. Instead of signing up for a long list of never-to-be-used gifts (yes, that milk frother we thought would be essential to our happiness is still in its box, two years later) propose that guests donate money to a charity that plants trees in the poorest areas of the world. But hey, unwrapping presents is tremendous fun, so if you’d really like some organic linens or a solar heater, look for eco gift registries, a selection of which are listed on Planet Green’s Top Green Wedding Tips.
Make Your Own Wedding Dress…Out of Toilet Paper: I’m not really sure that this qualifies as green, since presumably the gown doesn’t last very long, but I could not resist including a link to the Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest, in which brides-to-be must design and make a dress and headpiece using nothing but toilet paper, glue and tape. Let’s hope that contestants used toilet tissue made from recycled paper: According the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Shopper’s Guide to Home Tissue Products, if every household in the United States replaced just one roll of virgin fiber toilet paper (500 sheets) with 100% recycled ones, we could save 423,900 trees. For the record, I gave my own wedding dress to a charity in Israel that lends bridal gowns to women who can’t afford to rent or buy their own. I hope future brides enjoy wearing it just as much as I did.
Image courtesy of Dunikowski
Great advice on how to have a green wedding, and not just the usual fare. I like the idea of planting the wedding tree, but the toilet paper dress sounds like a nightmare if it rains!
Even better, cancel it, like Bristol and Levi. (Think of the savings in media coverage alone!)