8 Creative Ideas For a Sustainable Wedding
A gorgeous, white dress. A beautiful venue. A handsome man to call your husband. It’s your…WEDDING DAY!!
You may have been thinking about this day for years (I’m guilty as charged), but one aspect you might not have thought about is sustainability. Large-scale events like weddings can be extremely wasteful, so I wanted to share ideas I did for my wedding or wish I did to help with your planning!
My big day came last November when I married my husband, Riley, who I met at Iowa State. God blessed me with a truly good man, and he has been sticking with me in the craziness of our first year of marriage (baby, bought a house, moving to a new city, etc.). 😊
Sniff, sniff. I get more sentimental every time I look at our wedding pictures.
Photo Credit: Molly Skoglund Photography
We wanted our wedding to reflect who we were as a couple, so one of these aspects was sustainability as you could imagine! The best piece of advice I can give you about a sustainable wedding is to think through your wedding day ideas from beginning to end as waste usually comes when the plan isn’t completely thought through. For example, you may want to recycle but forgot to plan for who will take care of it at the end of the night, so your tipsy uncle ends up throwing it all away. 😊 Great people to help you think through the details are wedding planners! A wedding planner in the area I want to give a shoutout to is Anna Barton, owner of From Setup to Cleanup Wedding Coordinators in Ames, as I learned multiple ideas for this blog post from her 20+ years of experience in the wedding industry.
Alright, let’s get to it! Here are 8 creative ideas to make your wedding day a little greener:
Send Plantable seed paper Invitations
If you’re like me and like to get physical wedding invitations, consider getting plantable seed paper invitations or save-the-dates! We all know invitations get thrown out (or hopefully recycled) as soon as the wedding is over, so companies like Botanical Paperworks and stores on Etsy offer a neat solution where your invitation can have a second life and grow into a flower or plant.
Want an alternative option? My husband and I went with recycled paper through Minted and tried to limit how many pieces of paper were included in our invitations.
2. Upcycle Your Wedding Dress
One of my favorite experiences with wedding planning was shopping for my wedding dress. I had so much fun trying on dresses with my mom, sister, and mother-in-law, and I absolutely loved my dress which I bought from a local wedding store. I looked at wearing my mom’s dress before I went shopping, but it was too small for me. Thankfully, there’s people like Designed by Kanya Marie who can make this idea a reality. Kanya works with brides to custom design their wedding dress based on their budget and vision, so you could change about any dress into the one of your dreams (plus save money doing it!). Kanya’s creativity doesn’t stop there as she’s done projects using pieces of heirloom wedding gowns to decorate a bride’s robe and christening gowns for baptism.
Another idea is to visit a store like Something Blue which is a consignment store in Nevada, Iowa where 95% of their wedding dresses are brand new and reduced to 40-60% of the original price.
3. Bridesmaids Choose Their Dresses
A current trend which is also sustainable is to establish a color palette for your wedding and let your bridesmaids buy their own dresses within the color palette. This way there’s a higher likelihood they will wear the dress again, and it saves you time coordinating the details of their dresses. I wish I would have done this, but my sister did! Instead, I chose a single-colored dress and let my bridesmaids choose the neckline style. My thought was they would wear the dress again with its simplicity and comfort.
Want to extend this idea to your groomsmen? Pick a common suit color and have them wear their own suits.
4. Use Local Flowers
Flowers are a beautiful addition to your wedding, but unfortunately 80% of flowers are imported from countries such as Colombia, Netherlands, and Kenya. Consider buying from a local flower farm or growing your own flowers for your wedding which can add a special touch. Some florists will even work with you to plant the specific flowers you would like. In Central Iowa, there are plenty of options for local growers including Rose Farm, Elizabella Flower Farm, and more!
Have a wedding in the winter? You can choose sustainable options like evergreens, dried flowers, or sola flowers. Sola flowers are made out of a marshy plant, aeschynomene aspera (what a mouthful), and can be crafted and dyed to look like most any flower you can think of. Unfortunately, sola is currently only grown in foreign countries like India and Vietnam, so it’s not 100% sustainable, but they last forever and can be reused as decor in your house after the wedding. My good friend, Jenna Seymour, makes sola flower arrangements for weddings and you can find her over on Etsy.
5. Rent Your Décor
I’m super thankful we rented our décor as now I don’t have to worry about selling or giving away the collection of wedding décor we used. I see the benefit of buying used décor from other brides, but the time savings in not having to keep track of decor from buying until selling it again was definitely worth it for me. My wedding was in Northeast Iowa, so we used Casey with Affordable Elegance to rent our decor. Casey was super organized and made decorating a breeze for us! If you live in Central Iowa, there are numerous décor rental companies but a few to consider are Beyond Elegance Rentals and Wedding Trailer. Wedding Trailer has a neat capsule concept where you rent a literal trailer of décor with a pre-selected theme, so you don’t need to make specific decisions on decor. The trailer is a flat price, so you would most likely save money depending on your options as rental companies usually charge per item.
Our Wedding Centerpieces
Side Note: 95% of the foliage was real, and it was November!
Photo Credit: Molly Skoglund Photography
6. Request Sustainable Gift Wrapping
One of my favorite sustainable ideas was including a note on our website and registries requesting our gifts to be sustainably wrapped. It was fun to see our guests’ creativity come out with how they wrapped our gifts. My young cousin wrapped their family’s gift in magazine pages and drew on images she wanted us to notice such as an advertisement for rings. 😊 Other gifts were simply unwrapped shipping boxes and gift bags which I now reuse for other weddings I’m invited to.
My Wedding’s Sustainable Gift Wrapping Note
7. Don’t Give Out Favors
Wait, this is creative?? Maybe this isn’t the most unique idea, but it’s one I would love to see more often. We all have too many koozies (at least in the Midwest) or random engraved glasses sitting unused in our cupboards. You’re already providing so much for your guests at your wedding from the food to the entertainment, so it’s perfectly okay to bypass this wedding custom and put the money towards other activities you have planned for your guests.
If you’d still like to provide favors (it’s your wedding after all), consider what you’d like to have a 100 extra of as guests normally don’t take all the favors. Creative ideas I’ve heard or seen are mini succulents, tiny pots of honey, wood coasters, or tea sachets.
8. Compost Your Food Waste
Since I’m a compost nerd, composting our food waste was a must at my wedding. 😊 Thankfully, one of my guests was a member of my Compost Team from college, so he was delighted to take care of our food waste. The best way to compost at your wedding is to have a designated bin with easy-to-read signage next to the trash cans (see signage below). Make sure to assign who will be taking care of the compost bin at the end of the night, because you surely don’t want to worry about it the day of. If you live in Central Iowa, you can have the company, RecycleMeIowa, take care of everything and set up a zero-waste station with trash, compost, and recycling at your reception.
My Wedding’s Compost Bin Signage
There you have it, 8 creative ideas to create for an eco-friendly wedding! I hope you found inspiration to implement at least one of these sustainable ideas into your wedding day, but in the end, the ‘things’ don’t matter as much as reason for the day, your marriage. My prayer is that you’ve found a spouse who is a fitting marriage partner for you as your wedding is only a day, but marriage is for the rest of your life. Happy wedding planning, you’ve got this!
Please share this post with others who are thinking about or planning their wedding, so we can inspire more sustainable change together! You can also download and share my FREE infographic of this blog post below from my Sustainability Shop!
