Our Eco-friendly Wedding

Seven people rode in four cars (one of them a mini-van) to Tilden Park Sunday morning, April 22.  I hadn't wanted to take that many cars, but if we hadn't rented the van, we would have had to make multiple trips between home and the venue with the rest of the cars.  

The park was decorated with pennant flags made from pages of old books and dictionaries.  The tables were adorned with reused bottles and jars filled with paper cranes (made of book pages) and flowers made from yarn, dress patterns, and newspaper. 

We labeled the garbage cans, used biodegradable trash bags, and put signs in the bathrooms to remind guests to conserve paper towels.  The four trash cans at the picnic area were for compost (2), paper recycling, and landfill.  There was also bottle and can recycling already at the site.  Over the course of the day, none of the cans became full.  The park rangers thought someone had beaten them to taking out the garbage when they came midday to empty the cans.  They said typically they have to come three times during an event our size to take out the trash.  That's twelve bags of landfill waste.  And we didn't even fill one!  We took the compost and paper recycling home as they didn't have the proper facilities at the park.

We did not provide our guests with any water save that from the nearby drinking fountain.

All of our food was vegan and a lot of it came from local farmers' markets.  Our friends Becky and Charles bought pounds and pounds of produce from the El Cerrito Farmers' Market and made sure everyone there wished us well.

So how green was our wedding?  It was large, one hundred and sixty people, and that's one of the least green things about any wedding: the larger it is, the larger its carbon footprint.  Unfortunately, none of those hundred and sixty mentioned anything about taking public transportation or their bikes to get to the venue.  But several of our guests did donate money or their time to charity organizations -- including Native Energy, Oakland Based Urban Gardens, and Sustainable Markets Foundation -- to help offset our carbon footprint.

We used no electricity at the venue (though we did have a small, battery-powered sound system).

We donated about ten loaves of bread, two large bags of salad, and three bags of tortilla chips to the Alameda County Food Bank.  A lot of our fresh leftovers were divvied up between the guests.  

We recycled all of our bottles and a lot of our cups (glass jars with the labels peeled off) at the venue.  I have lots of decorations and utensils left over: paper cranes, embellished glass bottles and jars, yarn flowers, ceramic plates, silverware.  I hope to get the decorations reused by another bride by posting on Ruffled.  A lot of the utensils will go to my clients who need it.  We're trying to make sure everything we used but no longer need finds a good home far from the landfill.  Let me know if you're interested in anything you've seen.

Aside from the car emissions from all of our guests driving to the wedding, we did a pretty good job of making our event as eco-friendly as possible.  Over the next year, I intend on volunteering as often as possible for shoreline and regional park clean-ups to "erase" as much of our carbon footprint as I can.  I encourage you to join me.  Every day is Earth Day!