How To Achieve A Sustainable Wedding Reception In These 5 Steps
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By PAGE Editor
As much as you want to pull off that perfect dream wedding you’ve always wanted, sometimes, you also need to consider the environment. Most of you probably know that wedding celebrations and receptions generate a massive amount of waste. That’s because some of you tend to give in to the pressure of buying everything, so you end up producing plenty of waste at the end of the wedding day. Unfortunately, these wedding wastes will only pile up in growing landfills and emit higher carbon levels, eventually damaging the environment.
Thankfully, there are steps you can take to cut down your waste production while, at the same time, achieve your perfect wedding day. To begin, here are five steps to achieve a sustainable wedding reception.
Choose Your Floral Arrangements
To start, floral wedding arrangements are one of the most common things you see as wedding decorations. You might think that you’re not generating any waste with the use of flowers, but unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Using freshly cut plants and flowers isn’t good for the environment as you can’t reuse or replant them after the wedding, producing more waste. Most of these cut flowers are shipped from other countries, generating more carbon footprint.
Instead of cut flowers and plants, you can use potted flowers to decorate your wedding venue. You may also choose florist designed wedding centerpieces that are potted so you can reuse and display them in your home, patio, or outdoor garden once the event is over.
Aside from flowers, you can also use potted herbs or even small trees as wedding decorations. You can find yourself a local and sustainable florist to help you come up with floral decoration ideas that won’t hurt the environment and won’t compromise your wedding day.
Go For Sustainable Meals
Aside from the celebration and festivities, your wedding reception is mainly about the food you serve. For an eco-friendly wedding reception, it may be best if you also opt for sustainable meals.
You can look for food caterers who can serve you seasonal, local, and sustainable cuisine. Try to ask them if they’re working with local farmers who produce their own ingredients locally. The more you work with local food caterers, the smaller they produce less carbon footprint from international shipping.
Aside from food, you also need to consider sustainable drinks, especially your wine. Go for wine producers that use natural and organic bottlings since they focus on being eco-friendly. Keep in mind that single-serve wine packaging only produces more waste. Hence, you might as well use bigger glass bottles so you can repurpose them.
Reduce Food Waste
A buffet wedding reception comes with plenty of food leftovers. Unfortunately, most people tend to toss their leftovers in trash cans. Instead of a wedding buffet, try to consider plated dinners to minimize excess food. But if you still wish to have a wedding buffet, it may be best to negotiate with your food caterer about some ways to save the leftovers.
For instance, instead of serving everything at once, you can opt to serve food by batch. If there are leftovers or unserved food, you can donate them to homeless shelters or local food banks. If you take this route, make sure to work with the details ahead of time so the food will be packed and donated immediately after the wedding.
Avoid Single-Use Plates And Utensils
You might witness many wedding receptions using single-use plastic plates and utensils, especially if they’re trying to save their budget. While single-used dishes and utensils are more cost-efficient and simpler to use, these items are likely to be thrown into the landfill, harming the environment.
Instead of plastics, it’s best to find a catering service that can provide sustainable and eco-friendly dishes and utensils. These products are compostable and more likely to be reused than single-use plastics. Moreover, cut off the use of straws or use eco-friendly alternatives, such as steel straws or bamboo straws.
If you really wish to use real plates and utensils but couldn’t afford to buy them all, consider renting them from your catering service. Renting real plates and utensils is way better than using single-use plastics. What’s more, most catering services would even let you rent some linens for your wedding tables, improving your table’s presentation.
Host Your Wedding Reception Outdoors
Most wedding waste comes from the decoration you use for indoor wedding receptions. As you see, when you’re hosting an event inside a function hall or other indoor venue, you’ll need to use plenty of decoration to change the venue’s atmosphere and make it blend with your wedding theme. If you want to reduce the use of wedding decorations for your reception, consider hosting your wedding reception outdoors.
This is an excellent way to utilize nature’s natural beauty as your wedding decoration. You can have your reception in a lush forest, flowery garden, along the seashore, on top of the hills, etc.
Couples often visit this wedding venue to see if it fits their theme and the number of guests they wish to invite.
When hosting your reception outdoors, you need not try hard to change and decorate the venue, as the scenery will be more than enough to stun your guests. Plus, you also have the natural light to improve the photographs of your wedding reception.
Takeaway
Hosting your wedding reception doesn’t mean forgetting about your responsibility to the environment. With these steps, you can still achieve your dream wedding without being wasteful to the environment.
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