One of the biggest pieces of green wedding advice that I have read is to reduce the amount of travel (especially air travel) due to its impact on the environment.
No Planes!As you have probably figured out, this is a piece of green advice that we did not follow. We are having a destination wedding and 70 of the 75 guests will need to fly to San Francisco. I wish that we could have had a local wedding but this just wasn't an option for us. My family lives in Minnesota, Mr. Olive's family lives on the East coast and our friends are all over the country. We decided early on that the only way to make everyone happy was for everyone travel. We had dreamed about getting married in Napa Valley and we knew the perfect venue to bring together our family and friends.
We have incorporated many other green travel aspects into our wedding such as transporting guests by bus, using a limo company with a "green fleet" and choosing a hotel location that reduces the need to rent a car (more on these later).
If you are concerned about the travel impact of your destination wedding you can choose to purchase a carbon offset for a portion of your guest travel, your wedding event or your honeymoon. Offsetting guest travel would be a great alternative to the traditional favors! Each site calculates the amount of carbon a little differently. Here are two reputable carbon offset organizations with wedding calculators:
You can calculate and offset the carbon impact of your wedding in their ZeroCarbon™ Weddings section. The calculation takes into account the number of guests, number flying, avg. flight distance, number of cars, avg. driving distance, and the number of hotel night stays.
TerraPass also has a wedding calculator to determine a wedding output. Their calculator is more specific than Carbon Fund. It considers four different sources of emissions: airline emissions from guest travel (short, medium and long flights), automobile emissions from guest travel (number of cars and avg. miles), energy use in hotel rooms, and the energy use for the wedding itself (DJ, the caterer, temperature control, lighting, etc.).
The purchase of a wedding TerraPass includes "a certificate of offset with a handsome frame for display at your wedding (valued at $40, including shipping). The frame is made from salvaged Douglas fir using environmentally responsible materials and business practices. After your wedding, the frame makes a great keepsake."
1 comment:
Thank you so much for sharing these sites. I have a cousin who is trying to have a green bat mitzvah and she mentioned she was trying to find out about carbon offsets. They are also doing the bus from place to place.
Post a Comment