My big fat green wedding

My sister got engaged last week and this got me thinking about green weddings. When I got married three years ago I proudly touted it as a green event, but looking back on it, I’m not so sure it was so squeaky green. Here’s what we did:

• Invitations: I designed the invitations myself and had them printed on recycled card. I made all the table decorations from hand-made paper on and printed the menus on recycled paper.

• Venue: We got married in central London and encouraged guests to use public transport. We hailed a cab to and from the venue to avoid wasting cash and carbon on fancy cars.

• Dress: My dress was made for me by a local dressmaker. I tried to employ a “don’t buy what you don’t need” strategy because the frivolity can really get out of hand when you are in wedding shops. The lace was vintage, but the silk was not. My jewellery was either borrowed or made by a friend.

• Flowers: My poor florist got the full force of my Bridezilla as I asked her to source only seasonal and local flowers that were also dazzlingly beautiful in March. She did an amazing job and grew many of them herself, getting the rest from New Covent Garden Market.

• Food and drink: We went to great lengths to source local organic produce for our meal. The wine was all organic (although the champagne wasn’t!). We sourced our meat from the Ginger Pig, a butcher in London renowned for its ethical sourcing policy. (This was blinkin’ expensive!) We wrangled with the venue over the silliest things, over why frozen UK peas were better than fresh imported ones. I’m absolutely sure he was happy to be rid of us!

• Rings: a local craftsman in Ireland made our rings from white gold.

• Gifts: We asked that instead of giving gifts, guests could donate via justgiving to our two chosen charities (mine: the Rainforest Foundation, Brendan’s: The Connection at St Martins). We raised well over £1,000 for each charity but there were those who didn’t like the cold anonymity of cash donations and wanted to give us a tangible gift, so for them we set up a small list on http://www.ourgreenweddinglist.com. I must say it was nice to get a few gifts delivered when we got back from honeymoon, the most exciting of which was a rainwater butt (that is not sarcasm - it really was exciting!!).

• Transport: We encouraged our guests to offset their transport emissions via the carbon neutral company which invests in renewable energy projects.

• Honeymoon: we travelled around continental Europe by train and committed to making no long haul flights that year.

If I could do it all again, my top three tips would be the following:

1. Consider having a smaller wedding.
The carbon cost of the guests' travel was astronomical, so I would consider making it smaller in the first place or thinking twice about long-haul invites (er... not so easy when it is immediate family who live in Canada). Our wedding required 6 return flights from North America (6.6 tonnes), 2 from Australia (6.4 tonnes!!!), 60 from Ireland (12 tonnes) and 4 from continental Europe (1.2 tonnes). In total that is a whopping 26.2 tonnes of Co2!!

2. Go vintage.
While I went for a little vintage lace shrug, going the whole hog would have been better. Vintage (er... second-hand) is the answer to cutting the majority of both the environmental and ethical costs of the day. There are many vintage dress shops that can alter beautiful dresses to suit any figure, and were it not for the particular shopping madness that overwhelms most brides-to-be, I’m sure that this would be more common practice. Vintage jewellery could also help stem the tide of waste that accompanies gold mining: Payal Sampat, director of the No Dirty Gold campaign recently told Treehugger.com that: "Producing a single gold wedding band leaves behind 20 tonnes of waste at a mine site."

3. Look for an eco-venue or at least a place that has eco credentials.
Even though it was only three years ago, eco-venues are a lot more commonplace now than they were then. It was pretty knackering having to constantly explain our choices to our venue, when their major concern was cost and simplicity. It’s not like we weren’t on a budget too! Dealing with an eco-minded venue would have made the process a lot simpler and also given us the peace of mind that they have the energy efficiency and ethical sourcing parts of the wedding puzzle sorted. We got ourselves twisted up in knots sourcing our own food and wine to be prepared later by the venue. There are many eco-venues popping up all over now, so giving them the business over old-school room hire is the way to go I’d say.