While a wedding is one of the happiest days of our life, it can also be incredibly wasteful. As, when all the festivities are over, many of those beautiful flowers and decorations are destined to end up in the waste.
So, if you’re planning a wedding, what steps can you take to reduce the amount of waste at your big day? Well here are Kwiksweep’s top 6 tips for a more environmentally friendly wedding:
1: Donate Any Leftover Food
Food waste at a wedding can be a real problem, so to help ease this waste, contact local foodbanks to see if any local charities would pick up leftover food for you – just keep in mind that some food cannot be used due to safety issues.
You could also choose to have ‘to go’ boxes at your wedding, where your guests can take their leftovers home – ideal for a snack after one or two many drinks.
2: Donate Your Flowers
All those beautiful flowers that we buy to decorate our venues look spectacular – but what do you do with them the next day. Especially when there’s far too many for you to take home. Thankfully, there are companies like Repeat Roses, who aim to collect flowers from big events and re-gift them to people in places like nursing homes and hospices.
Not only will this save your flowers from the landfill prematurely, these flowers will bring further joy to someone else who might be feeling lonely or ill.
3: Be Careful with Confetti
While confetti might look superb in photographs, many forms of it can be harmful to the environment as they don’t degrade. Instead, look for biodegradable options online or look at alternatives such as your guests blowing bubbles a you pass.
4: Avoid Favours with a Lot of Waste
As lovely as those individual candles wrapped in plastic are or those little sweets you’ve put together, many favours come with a lot of waste. Worse still, as good as they look on the table, many guests will leave them behind on eventually throw them out.
Instead, consider either not having favours at all or instead making a donation to charity in each guest’s name.
5: Consider Buying Second-Hand
When it comes to weddings, it doesn’t matter if it’s your dress, the centrepieces or the decorations – we all think we should buy new. Not only is this expensive for you, there are plenty of second hand wedding items that are in perfect condition that could be used instead. Which helps save you money and keeps wedding décor away from landfills.
6: Sell on Your Wedding Dress
As sentimental as our wedding dresses are, they only get used once and then end up being boxed away for decades. Usually in the hope that a daughter might use it in the future – yet because of fashion trends they never get used.
Instead, by choosing to sell your wedding dress on, you can help someone else have their dream day in a gorgeous dress. Which means less demand for new dresses to be made!